Projecting the future: a call to arms

It’s time for a big conversation about the project profession’s future, says Tim Banfield, chair of APM’s Power of the Profession conference

APM’s London conference in May was a stellar reminder of the power of the profession, spanning the top secret, the award-winning and the groundbreaking.

Special guest Baroness Manningham-Buller highlighted the vital role of project management in supporting the doubling in the size of MI5 under her leadership through turbulent times in the 2000s, enabling a fivefold increase in the agency’s work. APM chair John McGlynn made a powerful appeal to professionals to call out poor practice wherever they see it, while Araceli Camargo shared insights from the latest neuroscience research. Tom Ollerton of Automated Creative provided a brilliant session on artificial intelligence (AI), showing how the future will be influenced by technology.

The conference provided a vital chance to talk about how the world in which we work is changing, how the profession is growing and how it must continue to evolve. We have to ask: what do we need to do not just to survive, but to thrive? That question is at the heart of Projecting the Future – an exciting new initiative launching at APM’s Manchester conference in June.

Industry 4.0 and PM 4.0

Running throughout the coming months, Projecting the Future will be a ‘big conversation’ about our place in a fast-changing and complex world. We stand on the verge of the fourth industrial revolution, driven by robotics and AI, climate-change demands, and ever-rising human longevity.

That could look daunting, but it shouldn’t – at least not to our profession – because projects are the way that successful change happens. It’s our profession that will be tasked with leading transformative change, from digitisation and the creation of ‘industry 4.0’ to the delivery of major public infrastructure. We have the chance to actively shape the future.

To build ‘PM 4.0’, we need to raise our game and be more ambitious about our role. We need to build a clearer picture of how projects benefit business and society, and develop more effective models for delivering value. Our time has come. We can take the next step on the journey from our roots as a technical function to becoming a true leadership delivery profession.

How we do that is the focus of Projecting the Future. By making it a big conversation, we intend to tap into the expertise of project professionals from across APM’s membership in every part of the economy. We will also be reaching out beyond the boundaries of our profession: talking to project sponsors and decision-makers – our customers – as well as to experts and leaders in the fields that will be influenced by our profession in the years ahead.

We don’t claim to have all the answers – or even to have thought of all the right questions. They will be crowdsourced from you. I urge you to take the opportunity to contribute, whether it’s through the content we’ll be publishing on the APM website, joining the conversation on Twitter or APM’s LinkedIn group, joining us on a webinar or sharing case studies of innovative practice in your organisation. There will also be chances to discuss these crucial issues in person, with APM events around the country planned for the months ahead.

Taking our rightful place

We can be immensely proud of the project profession’s evolution to date – and, at the same time, be ambitious to achieve more. We should be able look at major businesses and public-sector organisations in 10 to 15 years’ time and see as many chief executives with project backgrounds as we see with financial or legal backgrounds today. We have the potential to become a true leadership and delivery profession. I hope you will join us in shaping that future.

Tim Banfield is chair of APM’s Projecting the Future group, and a director at the Nichols Group. Find out more about Projecting the Future at apm.org.uk. On Twitter, search @APMProjectMgmt and #projectingthefuture. on LinkedIn, search APM to join the APM Group