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Project management software has continually evolved in order to keep up with the changing pace and expectations of today’s marketplace. Fortunately, technology is allowing project management software to gain sophistication, power and flexibility so project management can be integrated into every process of the organization. Subsequently technology ensures all the right people are informed with the right information along the way and processes are optimized so the end customer is delighted rather than just satisfied.

Everything in an organization is a project. Some things take a week while others a month or a quarter or more to finish. Whether it is the sales process, the product development process, the servicing or education process each within themselves are a mini or macro project requiring people, processes and information coordinated and executed in a timely fashion. Today's leaders and managers are informed by experience, technology and market demands, and technology plays a major role in facilitating ongoing improvement to an organizations performance. Performance improvement by itself is an ongoing project requiring people, information and analysis of process performance and customer experiences in an on demand digitally enhanced world. These dynamics are creating new trends that are affecting every organizations performance in 2015 and beyond. The top five emerging trends include: 

1) The Cloud Will Shift Emphasis from “Software” to “Services” 



The cloud is allowing organizations and project managers to worry less about how their software is working out for them and focus more on using software tools to improve services. Those “services” may be for internal or external customers. For example, getting a set of calculations to the engineering team a day early exceeds the expectations of your internal customers. Having a product fully ready for launch with customer service teams educated and prepared to improve the customer experience meets the needs of your external customers. The cloud removes many worries about buggy software integration or balky servers so your team can concentrate on more important things.

2) Project Management Will Become More Entrepreneurial

Innovation is essential to success in a highly tech-driven world, and that often requires an entrepreneurial approach to projects. For an organization to move beyond simple process improvement and get to real innovation, they will have to become more entrepreneurial. Some companies are responding by setting up innovation hubs or “incubators” that may have some separation from the main operations to encourage the kind of disruptive breakthroughs that sometimes only thrive with increased independence. It’s not always easy to give project managers freer rein, but it can be a differentiating factor in the success of a project supported with collaborative software.

3) Talent Management Will Start to Eclipse Hiring for Immediate Needs 

Successfully aligning talent strategy to organizational strategy can increase a company’s average project success rate and put less project funding at risk. The traditional practice of hiring only for immediate need and outsourcing where possible doesn’t always pay off in the long term. For these reasons, more organizations are starting to move toward a talent management strategy that brings talent on board that will be useful not just on today’s project, but on tomorrow’s as well. Acquiring and retaining top talent isn’t necessarily the easiest path, but it can help with long term project readiness and prevent the upheaval of immediate-needs hiring and procuring contractors on short notice.

4) Change Management and Project Management Will Converge

Change management and project management have a lot in common. Though project management is about, for want of a better term, “installation,” and change management is about getting a process from its current state to a better future state, the two are starting to merge for many organizations. With project management, there is definitely a perspective of having to deliver outcomes on time and within budget, but ultimately the goal of a project is to make the business better. When a project manager considers delivering an outcome rather than delivering business value to be the final goal, he or she is being short-sighted. Integrating change management into a project management software in 2015 is more forward-looking and takes business value into account better.

5) Project Culture Will Align More Closely with Organizational Culture

When a project culture is at odds with the overall organizational culture, success can be elusive. Organizational culture influences how team members work together, and when a team is assembled in a project culture that is completely new and different, risk escalates. For example, suppose a heavily rules-oriented organizational culture launches a project to improve customer engagement, which often requires greater autonomy among customer service agents. The result can be confusion about what is OK and what is not OK to do in the context of the project. Identifying such cultural mismatches early and addressing them can prevent such problems. 

Conclusion about the Top 5 trends Shaping your organizations performance in 2015 and beyond 

Top trends for performance improvement 2015 have to do with both technology and with less tangible factors, like company culture and user experience. Today's ideal project management software simplifies planning and facilitates project execution, offering real-time views of priorities, resource workloads, and tracking progress automatically. With APIs for third party system integration and integration adapters for common applications, these kind of real-time agile socially oriented project management platforms are ready to help your organization have a much higher impact on performance and customer satisfaction. That is why DevDigital has built a custom project management platform that can be customized for any organization or industry looking to improve performance. Our platform is available for demo and license to any interested party. Simply contact Phillip Turner or Josh Griffin at phillip@devdigital.com or josh@devdigital.com for more information or a demo.