In 2004 I landed my first professional role as a junior project manager for one of South Africas largest financial services companies.
I was part of the Strategic Projects Unit and as project managers we were seconded to different business units to run projects. One of the things I remember most and very fondly were the golfer t-shirts that we wore on casual Friday. It made us feel part of this very special team of people that used very special tools and processes to run projects.
In the early 2000's Microsoft Project was the corporate "go-to" tool for building out plans and putting together Gant or Pert charts which was part of a much broader set of reporting tools that in turn was part of a project methodology that was used across the organisation.
Corporates either used a methodology based on PM BOK or there was an outright use of Prince 2. Very few tertiary institutions actually offered training in either of those, meaning you would need to find and attend a private institution and then write an international exam that certified you Eg PMP.
Midway through the 2000's companies like 37 signals started gaining traction and began popping up on the local radar. I remember Basecamp being a project management "game-changer" in as much as it took so much of the convoluted and intricate planning and put the basics of planning into the hands of everyone regardless of the type of business you were in.
Suddenly, so many of the "creative" industries could now use tools that were much much cheaper and available on-the-go to create simple, easily understood lists of tasks. It even had the ability to create dependencies. What it lacked in depth and complexity relating to planning it made up for in simplicity, ease of use and the fact that it knew who it was trying to serve.
Fast forward to 2018 and there is literally an app for everything, with most core business functions being offered via Software-as-a-Service and project management is no exception.
One could argue that by using google business suite, you have access to integrated email, task tracking, calendar syncing and shared documents - all of which would originally be part of your data taxonomy in project management, usually supplied by propriety (often very costly) systems...
With all of the conventional checks and balances typically supplied by project management tools now built into your daily work routine, one has to ask how project management as a field will evolve in order to remain relevant and immune to the kind of disruption taking place across all industries....
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