2017 shaped up to be a year full of business opportunities and trendy management tools to help create a better, more stable and more efficient business. Want to know how the project management field has changed over the past couple of months?

Agile project management. Agile project management has long been confined in the software development field, but it is now being used outside IT. For instance, there’s the agile marketing manifesto, editorial staff who makes use of Kanban software to manage articles, Scrum, on the other hand, is being used in finance for almost half-decade now.

When considering a specific tool for your business, it is worth consulting some business management professionals first before taking the plunge. They will be able to help you assess your processes and recommend the right tool to enhance how you do business.

Non-traditional collaboration tool. 2017 marked the beginning of a shift to collaboration software, with Slack in the forefront. This application, among many others, is already being used to encourage management within the workforce. While these tools are not actually built for project management from its roots, you will need to make a few adjustments.

NPD PPM. Stands for new project development project portfolio management software. This tool has been slowly creeping into enterprise product development businesses. This tool is being used along with Agile and allows consumers to be pitted against talented product developers to give product innovation that can never be fast enough to meet market demands.

New project managers adapt emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence or EQ got a lot more important to project managers. Managers are already using this to assess and manage emotions and the emotions of others. The skills associated with this includes:

  • Emotional awareness and the ability to identify personal emotions as well as others’.
  • The ability to acquire emotions and use them for tasks like thinking and problem-solving.
  • The ability to manage emotions, which includes the capacity to control personal emotions, as well as the ability to cheer up or calm down another person.

Move from operational hierarchies to maximize employee strengths. While it’s true that organizational and cultural strengths are influenced by the management team, there’s a quiet employee-level distress that is heard throughout the company. Leadership will need to find constructive and dynamic ways to find, encourage and reward the various strengths of their staff to create and brand a tougher team environment.

Need for more accountability and social responsibility. Ask most business owners about the most important thing and they’re quick to say that it’s the profit, but it’s not good to focus only on the bottom line. Both accountability and social responsibility come to factor when it comes to doing business. This is where the entire world is watching, and companies can no longer be anonymous, so social responsibility efforts have become a thing for business of all size.

Remote work. We are in a mobile work with the workforce becoming more mobile and disbursed, increasing the need for remote project management tools and labor. Thankfully, there’s a lot of technology available in 2017 to address this issue, but cloud computing comes on top.

End Note

Remember, you can always get professional business management support online in any step of your project management utilization goal. Does this list of project management trends seem reasonable to you? What are the project management trends do you want to apply in the workplace? And what are the project management trends you see in the competition? Join the conversation below.

By Eddy

Eddy is the editorial columnist in Business Fundas, and oversees partner relationships. He posts articles of partners on various topics related to strategy, marketing, supply chain, technology management, social media, e-business, finance, economics and operations management. The articles posted are copyrighted under a Creative Commons unported license 4.0. To contact him, please direct your emails to [email protected].