The New “P’s” of Project Management for 2023

You’ve heard them all. Proper preparation prevents poor performance. Projection, project planning, project execution, performance/monitoring, and project close. Perhaps you’ve even heard the “P’s” of Earned Value Management (EVM): project plan, planned value, pre-defined earning rules, actual cost of work performed, and a plot of cumulative costs vs. time.  

Project managers enjoy a variety of alliterative representations of their role. However, the last several years have ushered in exponential change for PMs worldwide. As we enter the new year consider how your PM teams are embracing the new “P’s” of 2023 and beyond. 

Promote Sustainability 

Project managers play a crucial role in environmental conservation. It’s no longer enough to develop stand-alone green projects: Project managers must promote entirely sustainable ways of working across their entire portfolio and project life cycle, from planning and supply chains to building practices. They must shift from a focus on a project’s bottom line to a focus on the triple bottom line.  

Doing so will require greater engagement with stakeholders and increased PM creativity to deliver solutions that meet client expectations around time, costs, and quality in the most sustainable ways possible. Project managers that begin to hone those skills in 2023 will guarantee relevance in the future. 

Practice Resiliency   

Managing heightened risk—from broken supply chains to cyber security breaches to inflationary pressures—is the new normal. Project managers must embrace the chaos of change with resilient practices.  

By utilizing an EVM-established baseline of work, budget, schedule, and responsibility across a wide range of scenarios PMs can form likely outcomes and support actions to manage any number of risk factors. Consider outsourcing this type of scenario planning: Manta Ray Consulting can help your PMs prepare for a myriad of risk factors while maintaining focus on the current path forward.   

Project managers must also focus on establishing more resilient supply chains in 2023, as a reliable supply chain will continue to be a key differentiator between projects that flourish or flounder in the future. For PMs that means establishing a diversified supply chain enterprise across channels, products, geographies, and solutions to allow for resilient sourcing no matter what the economic market throws their way.  

Project Visibility  

To be more sustainable and resilient you must start with a clear understanding of your current state. Effective prediction and scenario-planning requires an honest assessment of the weak points across your project life cycle, from supply chain and security to staffing.  

This type of visibility is best achieved through data, and more specifically a data strategy custom-built to accumulate and analyze an increasing number of internal and external data points. In 2023 PMs must become fluent in the data resources they possess and begin to harness those resources in ways that support not just the traditional “P’s” of project management, but project visibility as well. Our Process Jumpstart methodology is designed to provide this type of business and project environment assessment, while also establishing a tracking plan and data base designed to help PMs fully understand and optimize their data resources and needs.  

The old adage still stands true: Proper preparation really does prevent poor performance. However, PMs must evolve their definition of “proper preparation” in 2023 to include more sustainable practices, greater resiliency, and improved visibility to thrive in the unknown conditions ahead.