Towards project management 2.0

Abstract

Project management approaches derived from best practices in the defence/aerospace, construction and pharmaceutical industries during the early 1970s have proven effective for managing small numbers of large projects in the relatively stable political, economic and technological context of the post-World War II period. However, the detailed, centralized planning, decentralized execution and centralized control of large projects that are the basis of these ‘PM 1.0’ methods and tools have proven burdensome and unresponsive for a new generation of workers who have grown up in a Web 2.0 world and who are now working on cutting-edge projects with rapidly evolving technologies in today’s extremely dynamic global markets and political economies. A new set of ‘PM 2.0’ methods, tools and governance arrangements were pioneered for rapid product development and have recently been adapted for agile software development. They are based on a radically different project management philosophy for dealing with these new contingencies. This paper reviews the origins of PM 1.0 to explain why it was a valid approach for the latter half of the twentieth century; explains why the key assumptions underlying this method are frequently no longer valid; describes some of the key elements of evolving PM 2.0 approaches to project management in industries ranging from ‘software in the cloud’ development to special operations in the US military and discusses the kinds of tools, employee training and human resources practices that will need to evolve to support PM 2.0 for the ever more dynamic and unpredictable projects of the twenty-first century. This paper concludes with a discussion of the limitations of PM 2.0 and a set of key questions that will need to be answered through future research before the PM 2.0 approach can become more widely adopted for managing engineering project organizations.