The term “project economy” was coined by the Project Management Institute in 2019. This video introduced the new vision: “At PMI we power the project economy”
In the project economy, people have the skills and capabilities they need to turn ideas into reality, and organizations deliver value to stakeholders through successful completion of projects, delivery of products, and alignment to value streams.
This video inspires a “fresh air” on project management. In the project economy, project team members are encouraged to grow their social skills to work inside cohesive synergetic teams. Project managers perform servant leadership. PMO promotes agile methods. Projects are the mechanisms to deliver value inside organizations.
According to author Antonio Nieto Rodriguez in his book “The Project Revolution: How to Succeed in a Project Driven World”, the profession of the project manager is on the rise: the number of individuals working in project-based roles will increase from 66 million in 2017 to 88 million in 2027. The value of economic activity worldwide that is project oriented will grow from $12 trillion in 2013 to $20 trillion in 2027.
The project economy does not consist only of young people collaborating on projects. What should be the role of a top manager in the project economy?
For a CEO, for instance, a project is just a means to get a product, service, or final result. They are more interested in operation management than in project management. How should they behave in the project economy? Should they blindly trust on self-organized teams? In agile projects, are they allowed to ask for completion dates, final budgets, direct margin, etc.?
Top managers are to play a key role in the project economy. They can delegate the actual project management to professional project managers, but they also need to perform the strategic part of the project economy. That is demand management, project prioritization, project portfolio and program management, value management, benefit realization, etc.
In PMPeople, top managers can use 4 premium roles: Functional Managers, Requesters, Portfolio Managers and Program Managers; and 2 free roles: Sponsors and Stakeholders. These 6 roles implement more than 50 use cases!
PM² methodology proposes similar roles like Appropriate Governance Body, Project Owner, Business Manager and the Business Implementation Group.
In this article we review some practical examples on how managers can perform some use cases in the project economy using PMPeople. To have the complete description, just download the pdf manual for the Functional Manager Role role at: https://bit.ly/PMPeople_FM_EN
Project Governance
Functional Managers have a quick access to the complete list of projects inside their business units. They can filter projects by several criteria to focus on the critical few:
Controlling the Projects Revenue
Functional Managers can monitor the funding performance of any project to make sure projects are eventually profitable:
Managing Projects inside Business Units
Functional Managers can create or delete business units—deleting a business unit is serious because all projects inside are also deleted.
Dashboards and KPIs
For each review date, Functional Managers can monitor project schedule and milestones, comparing schedule baselines to actual and estimated dates:
