good employee attitudeA new year means new lists, and ESI International, the leading project management training company, has released its 2015 list of top 10 trends for project management. Changing climates and increasing demands for talent management can leave a gap between job expectations and the realities of working with teams, which can leave managers in need of leadership team building activities and training.

“All too often people talk about strategy and execution independently,” said Mark Bashrum, ESI VP of Marketing and Strategic Intelligence. “In the coming year we will see a heightened focus on managing the critical links connecting the two, as more organizations begin to view strategic execution as a core discipline.”

The top 10 project management trends for 2015 include:

  1. Leaders will manage the gap between cloud-based platforms’ constraints and the others’ expectations.
  2. Managers will focus on talent management within the project management community.
  3. Managers will implement hybrid project methods.
  4. Organizations will need to find and hire project management talent from a dwindling field.
  5. Managers will link project outcomes to strategies by building bottom-up processes.
  6. Project managers will not receive the coaching and mentoring programs they require.
  7. Project managers will avoid difficult situations and conversations, resulting in sacrificed transparency.
  8. Project management and the disciplines of change management will continue to merge.
  9. Business strategy and project management will better align.
  10. Risk management practices will consider organizational culture to a greater extent.

“The impact on project management is substantial,” added Bashrum. “Project managers, who are typically held accountable for delivering project outcomes, will now also be responsible for how those deliverables impact the business. This will require a retooling of their skillsets, but in the end it elevates the PM’s role as a critical enabler of business strategy, and that’s a very good thing for project managers who can make the jump.”

To facilitate the jump and make the transition a little easier, leaders can attend a leadership team building seminar or workshop, such as the 6 Principles That Build High Performance Problem Solving Teams Leadership Clinic, to better learn to address problems as they arise.

Leaders who attend the clinic:

  • Discover how to build clear and more successful team outcomes.
  • Learn how to optimize team commitment and engagement for productive results.
  • Leverage team decisions to forge a more cooperative, synergistic team so the team’s deployment is on target or ahead of schedule.
  • Eliminate stress and frustration on teams by learning to build agreements that help people collaborate to achieve mission-perfect results.

This type of clinic is beneficial for many different types of leaders, including project managers, and the learned principles help leaders to fill the gaps from the reported trends and the realities of project management roles.

“The project manager’s role will continue to evolve in 2015,” said Bashrum. “Savvy PMs will see the writing on the wall and work to upgrade their competencies in some critical areas. Improving interpersonal skills, learning the discipline of strategic execution, and becoming well versed in change management practices should be on every PM’s list of New Year’s resolutions.”

Copyright TIGERS Success Series, Inc. By Dianne Crampton

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TIGERS Success Series, Licenses HR professionals and consultants in the use of the TIGERS proprietary resources that improve workplace trust, interdependence, genuineness, empathy, risk and result.  When these six principles are strengthened so is employee engagement and retention. This is because employees enjoy not only the work environment but their colleagues, too.

Learn how these six principles build high performance teams and the behaviors that support them in the  6 Principles  Self-study Leadership Program. Learn at your own pace in the privacy of your office or home. Or take it a step further by joining the TIGERS Den Leadership Training Community and receive the same 6 Principles Resources with more support.