Project management skills in a digital era

Question

In the contemporary digital era, project managers are asked to enhance and gain new skills that will help them manage transformation projects to support new digital technologies.

What skillset and competencies do you think project managers should have?

How do you suggest them to gain these skills and competencies? What role has ethics in these transformative times?

Answer 1

From a digital transformation perspective, I strongly believe that a PM must have a mindset focusing on system architecture and useful information over raw data.

There's an emphasis on trying to digitize everything, model what was once a document, link systems and create digital dashboards with no real understanding of the underlying functionality gained.

It is also very easy to hide the lack of achieving any real functionality, by demonstrating flashy looking widgets, or what we once called dancing baloney.

You can get a masters level certificate in Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE), but I think most importantly, a Project Manager needs to think several steps ahead and focus on how to use this technology, rather than falling into the trap of doing a lot of work to show early results, and figure out how to use it later.

I've come up with lots of phrases to describe how the difference between speed and velocity is that velocity includes a direction, such as Sprints to Nowhere.