Forbes Advisor looks at the 2023 Project Management Trends in all non-stop digitalisation-sustained project management work sectors and came up with the following.
Significant changes are occurring in nearly every industry as technology advances and attitudes surrounding work and leadership evolve. Project management is no exception, and the styles and strategies for managing both the technical and human aspects of team projects are being adapted to accommodate the new workplace landscape emerging in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Here are the 2023 project management trends that we anticipate growing in the year to come.
A Continued Shift Towards Digital and Remote Work
In our post-pandemic world, fully remote and hybrid work options are here to stay. Gallup reports approximately 56% of full-time employees can fulfill job requirements entirely from home. The transition to fully remote work during the pandemic further illustrated productivity and effectiveness in the workplace could be maintained, even when a majority of employees were working from home.
Pros and Cons
From a project management standpoint, this transition has its pros and cons. Working in the same physical location as other team members promotes team-building and spontaneous collaboration that can be otherwise limited in a virtual workspace. Despite the perks of in-person collaboration, however, remote employees enjoy the flexible nature of working from home and report increased satisfaction with their work. When given the choice, many remote employees would prefer to remain remote or partially remote instead of returning full-time to the office.
As we move into 2023, project managers are challenged with navigating team dynamics and productivity in an increasingly digital environment.
Preference for Cloud-Based Operations
The transition to more remote working environments has created reliance on cloud-based computing solutions and communication networks. Cloud-based systems can provide cost-effective alternatives to traditional operations without surrendering performance and function. The ability for employees to access cloud-based networks from any location has made them the new standard for modern companies.
The Changing Responsibilities of a Project Manager
The scope of a project manager’s responsibilities is shifting, with more emphasis placed on flexibility, team dynamics and contributions outside of the project requirements.
Project Management and Change Management
In recent years, companies have enacted increasing numbers of change initiatives to organizations and the structures within. Project managers are learning to integrate the requirements of these change initiatives into project management strategies and plans. It is crucial to create a flexible methodology for integrating change initiatives with specific steps and protocols that your team can follow. These skills will continue to be relevant in coming years as companies grow and conform to the ever-evolving workplace standards.
Hybrid Approaches
Project success strategies have traditionally relied upon adherence to a single project management methodology. Recently, an increasing number of companies have merged multiple approaches to project management in an effort to increase flexibility and create a style that’s adapted to the needs of the individual project. Hybrid approaches also work well when faced with the task of integrating the expectations of new change initiatives presented by company leaders.
Increasing Connection Between Projects and Strategy
Project managers increasingly are asked to expand the scope and scale of strategies in growing workplaces. Rather than simply focusing on individual projects in isolation, project managers are being tasked with learning how individual projects relate to one another and how they work together to advance the goals of the company. This type of understanding can promote the strategic use of a project manager’s skills and help them to consistently make decisions that align closely with the company’s vision.
Advanced Project Management Tools, Solutions and Software
Technological advancements and improvements in software and automation have made their way into nearly every industry, project management included. Digital tools can help make the job of a project manager more efficient.
Increased Prevalence of AI and Automation
Artificial intelligence, automation, machine learning and data collection and analysis are rapidly becoming critical elements in project management strategies. According to PwC, 77% of high-performing projects utilize project management software to help streamline their work and meet their goals.
AI has the capacity to evaluate outcomes and provide insights into performance strengths and weaknesses, provide organized data to guide important decisions, predict outcomes, estimate timelines, analyze risk and optimize resource distribution. Project management tools and software can also automate time-consuming administrative tasks normally performed by the project manager, leaving the project manager free to focus time and energy on more critical or more nuanced tasks.
Project managers who take the time to understand how the AI and automation processes in their organization can complement their role will be well-prepared to take advantage of this resource.
Increased Focus on Data
Project management and data go hand in hand. A project manager who successfully uses available data to gain insight into key metrics can craft a targeted strategy to improve existing processes and further the goals of their business. Project management software can assist with both data collection and analysis, and provide concise evaluations and visualization tools for project managers to refer to in team building, productivity and time management efforts.
Emphasis on Soft Skills and Emotional Intelligence
As AI and automation take over aspects of the more technical side of project management, more emphasis is placed on the soft skills a project manager needs to effectively connect with, motivate and manage teams. These skills include emotional intelligence, communication, conflict resolution, mentoring and training, adaptability, time and risk management, leadership, team building and decision making.
Choosing the Best Project Management Software
Project management software can make a tremendous difference in the effectiveness and efficiency of a team and its leaders. With so many options to choose from, it may be challenging to know which software best fits the needs of your team. We’ve reviewed many of the available options and created a list of our picks for the best project management software based on ease of use, cost and fees, features and functionality, customer support and customer reviews.
THE looked at the MENA higher education establishments by measuring their knowledge transfer, impact and international outlook, thus in Rankings for 2022 that are given by Country breakdown. It would be interesting to compare the same Rankings in 2021.
Arab University Rankings 2022: Country breakdown
The different countries of the Arab region have different strengths in higher education. Here we explore their scores against THE’s five pillars: teaching, research, citations, society (which measures knowledge transfer and impact) and international outlook
Algeria’s overall score is 24.3, based on 21 universities ranked, making it the lowest ranking region in the table. The average score for society is higher than for three other countries, however, at 26.9.
Egypt
Egypt features in the top half of the table, with an overall score of 59.6 based on 34 universities. While the country scores especially high for citations (71.3), it falls down on international outlook (45.3).
Iraq
While Iraq’s average overall score is among the lowest in the region, based on 23 universities ranked, the country does punch above its weight in the society pillar, with an average score of 59.0.
Jordan
An all-rounder, Jordan has average scores in the 40s for all the pillars. And when it comes to working internationally, it scores 53.8, based on 14 universities ranked.
Lebanon
Lebanon is the third-highest scoring country in the region, or the second-highest when excluding countries with fewer than five universities ranked. Its strengths are teaching (82.9) and research (79.0), but its weakness is citations (39.4).
Morocco
The average overall score for Morocco is 37.4, based on 10 universities ranked. The country’s strongest pillar is society, where it has an average score of 54.2.
Saudi Arabia
With the seventh-highest score in the region (or fourth when discounting countries with fewer than five universities ranked), Saudi Arabia scores well all-round. Its strongest areas are international outlook (75.2) and citations (74.7).
Tunisia
With an overall score of 44.4, based on 10 universities, Tunisia sits around the middle of the table. The pillar on which it performs best is teaching (53.2), followed by research (50.3); it is weakest on citations (23.2).
United Arab Emirates
The UAE has the highest average overall score in the region, when counting countries with five or more universities ranked, at 71.2. It scores especially well on the international outlook pillar (82.4). Its lowest scoring pillar is society at 51.0.
Smart Cities World‘s Climate action on why satellite data is key to smarter, sustainable cities is all about information relayed to enhance sustainability in the built environment generally and/or help in an easy and less costly understanding of smart cities development.
Why satellite data is key to smarter, sustainable cities
By Gaetano Volpe: CEO, Latitudo 40
Satellite imagery can act as “a time machine” for cities battling climate change, says Gaetano Volpe of Latitudo 40, helping us understand the past and future.
The image above is of Latitudo 40’s solution that brings together satellite imagery and artificial intelligence.
An IoT sensor is great for collecting data on the state of air quality from the moment it is deployed but that data tells us nothing about what happened previously to create the current environmental conditions.
If data is to truly help us build more sustainable, safer, healthier and greener cities, we need technologies that enable us to understand what has happened in the past and predict how a situation might evolve in the future. It isn’t a lack of datasets standing in the way of doing this but rather knowing how to use the ones that already exist.
Climate initiatives
In Europe and around the world, initiatives such as the EU’s Climate-Neutral & Smart Cities mission and its Mission on Adaptation to Climate Change are helping to galvanise climate action but nobody is under-estimating the scale of the challenge. What these initiatives have in common is the need for constant monitoring of a city’s territory and environment to assess the current situation and check progress. Moreover, this monitoring needs to be put in context with information from decades past to gain the necessary deeper understanding.
This was the aim when developing the climate change adaptation and mitigation platform Latitudo 40, that allows cities to be constantly monitored. It uses raw data generated by earth observation satellites, combined with artificial intelligence (AI), to understand how the earth’s systems have changed and predict how they will evolve in the future. It is designed to provide a more sustainable and resilient approach to urban climate action.
If data is to truly help us build more sustainable, safer, healthier and greener cities, we need technologies that enable us to understand what has happened in the past and predict how a situation might evolve in the future
In our specialist field of satellite remote sensing, we see a lot of valuable data available, but cities are using only a small portion of it to support key decision-making. To change this, we combine data from satellites with data produced within the city and, through a fusion of the two, create information models that help inform urban planners where to invest money and resources when it comes to protecting and futureproofing their cities.
A typical example is our dataset for estimating urban thermal comfort, which brings together information on urban heat island areas, tree canopy (or lack of it) and the age distribution of the resident population. A digital representation of a city can be created in a matter of hours that quickly highlights and offers insight into key climate and sustainability issues.
Satellite technologies are now several decades old but, due to their complexity, have never reached a mainstream level of usage in the market. Image search and image processing requires specific skills and complex processing systems that aren’t typically available within cities. To make the best possible use of the information potential of these images, we have developed what we call “complexity simplification,” a cloud-based processing workflow that automates image search, analysis, and interpretation.
Computer vision and AI algorithms complete the process by extracting the parameters of greatest interest to cities and presenting a simple representation of the evolution of the urban scenarios over time.
Continuous and frequent monitoring
Crucially, unlike the aforementioned IoT sensor, satellite imagery allows for a historical representation of the city, almost a time machine that facilitates an understanding of the starting- and end-point and what happened in between, as well as continuous and frequent monitoring into the future.
Thanks to satellite imagery, we can easily understand whether there has been land consumption and how much the relationship between green areas and urbanisation has changed; the state of urban green spaces and how they contribute to mitigating environmental phenomena; and what phenomena have triggered a specific event, such as a flood or the failure of urban infrastructure in the past and activate the best monitoring systems to prevent them occurring in the future.
It’s one thing having the data and tools, though, and quite another ensuring they are accessible to those who need them. If they are to be truly effective, they need to be embedded in the daily operations of urban planners and decision-makers just like spreadsheets and email.
Thanks to satellite imagery, we can easily understand whether there has been land consumption and how much the relationship between green areas and urbanisation has changed
This thinking underpinned the development of Latitudo 40, which we describe as “a digital information factory in the cloud”. It can be accessed by a standard web browser and the processing made available through APIs that allow easy integration with existing spatial information systems. No special knowledge of data processing and geospatial analysis technologies is required and analyses provide a representation of the city with an easy-to-understand map, graphs and automated reports.
From this information, cities can set specific sustainability goals such as increasing green space per inhabitant, reducing the incidence of urban heat islands per inhabitant, and improving climate comfort in metropolitan suburbs. Every city can verify these goals and achievements via monitoring.
Our experience has made us realise that when it comes to data collection and reporting, city managers often allocate high-end budgets for consulting services that can stop with the creation of a static product. What’s needed going forward is a more agile approach facilitated by business models such as software-as-a-service (SaaS) and backed by real-time, accessible data and services. Only then will we be able to turn data into actionable information and use it to build more sustainable, resilient safer, healthier and greener cities.
Is digital trust the key to sustainable planning? wondered Nicole Bennetts, Senior Urban and Regional Planner in an ARUP blog. The answer follows.
Is digital trust the key to sustainable planning?
Our growth challenges in cities globally are becoming more complex. Now more than ever, we need new solutions and creativity to help us shape more resilient and sustainable cities in the future.
For the first time in history, we have access to dynamic urban data to understand people’s collective behaviours in real time. If used, this expansive evidence base can help planners, designers, and decision-makers make more informed decisions about the future of our cities.
However, the timing dilemma is an obstacle in harnessing this data. While urban environments typically develop every 50 years, technology moves more rapidly, significantly improving every five years, creating a disparity between urban planning and urban living.
So how does the planning industry keep pace with digital technology to create sustainable outcomes? One way is to improve our relationship with the digital world and put trust and confidence in digital tools and innovative solutions.
While urban environments typically develop every 50 years, technology moves more rapidly, significantly improving every five years, creating a disparity between urban planning and urban living.
While urban environments typically develop every 50 years, technology moves more rapidly, significantly improving every five years, creating a disparity between urban planning and urban living.
Why should planners trust data and digital?
Our cities are where urban planning and living come together. They are a super ‘neural network’ of interrelated systems. To create intelligent, responsive cities, urban development must embrace new possibilities using data and the internet of things (IoT).
Technology and data have never been more available. As a result, urban planning has a massive opportunity to unleash its full potential by investing more time and resources into harnessing data and digital planning.
Tools like the ‘digital twin’ are likely to become an indispensable part of future ‘urban infrastructure’, enabling the seamless integration of the ‘physical’ and ‘digital’ worlds and redefining how we plan.
Similarly, digital master planning is a framework to test thousands of options based on various variables and parameters to test failure, resilience, adaptative pathways, optimal living conditions, human health and welling, energy efficiency and more.
The planning industry must adapt to this changing paradigm, by matching the efforts and confidence invested in building the cloud system and IoT coverage, or risk being left behind.
To create intelligent, responsive cities, urban development must embrace new possibilities using data and the internet of things (IoT).
How Arup planners are using the power of digital
Projects worldwide show the value and credibility of digital tools to create growth and provide sustainable outcomes.
Cities urban tree canopy is a critical component of green infrastructure providing comfortable environments and reducing heat. Arup’s leading Urban tree canopy analysis used is a study for the City of Gold Coast, which uses a computer algorithm to determine the percentage of vegetation cover over different time intervals to show canopy changes.
Terrain is Arup’s bespoke artificial intelligence and land use analysis tool. It harnesses the power of data analytics, machine learning and automation to accurately digest large quantities of data and satellite imagery. Using this tool, we calculated seven cities’ sponginess by measuring the green and blue infrastructure areas to understand how cities can better use this infrastructure to face increasing threats from climate change – including heavy rainfall and extreme heat events.
Another Arup tool is the City Algorithm Tool (CAT) which tests hundreds of growth scenarios using different development and community value parameters to determine optimal outcomes for urban living. For example, Smakkelaarsveld in the Netherlands used algorithms to optimise the scheme design against multiple KPIs, including sustainability and environmental objectives.
Similarly, digital master planning can test site and precinct options based on various variables and parameters to test failure, resilience, adaptative pathways and optimal living conditions.
The last example, solar analysis helps test hundreds of layouts and orientations to achieve optimal living conditions and thermal comfort. For example, for Mahindra World City Jaipur, we used solar assessment tools to determine the optimal orientation for the plots and streets to provide thermal comfort in a hot climate.
Small risks, great rewards
Trust in the planning process is the foundation for our cities to take the best path to sustainable growth. Taking small, calculated risks in improving our digital capabilities now can lead to great rewards for our cities.
Taking small, calculated risks in improving our digital capabilities now can lead to great rewards for our cities.
Speed and efficiency, automating tedious and repetitive tasks and allowing more design and collaboration time.
Test 3D scenarios, assessing hundreds or thousands of options during the planning process against agreed parameters or criteria.
Facilitate approval process, comparing design scenarios with consented planning schemes and existing site conditions for faster agreement on key issues.
Identify client priorities; testing many possibilities can help identify what is most important.
Improve participatory design; with more data, we can understand community needs and improve community engagement.
What is the MENA countries’ Soft Power Ranking? According to the latest Global Soft Power Index 2022, a nation’s ability to influence, whether through attraction or persuasion, the behaviour and preferences of different actors on the international scene, including political regimes, businesses, and communities. That is nowadays labelled “Soft Power.”
So, here is the MENA countries’ soft power ranking
Certain countries of the MENA suffer from a loss of influence on the international stage. They are dangerously retreating in favour of several small countries that manage to acquire a much more powerful brand image.
The assessment of the strength of the national brand is based, among other things, on data from the “Soft Power Index” as compiled by Brand Finance.
Fifty-five thousand people from more than 100 countries were asked about the reputation of countries and their influence on the international scene.
According to Brand Finance, countries with high overall ratings are suitable for investment. They also have an easier time marketing their brands and products.
Founded in 1996, Brand Finance, an accounting firm touted as the world’s leading independent brand valuation and brand strategy consulting group, is present in more than 20 countries and is at the service of Marketing, Finance, Tax & Legal departments as well as Business Leaders. It is the first brand valuation US consultancy to join the International Valuation Standards Council, an independent, not-for-profit, U.S.- incorporated, private sector standards organization headquartered in the United States with its social headquarters in London, United Kingdom.
For several years, the Global Soft Power Index (GSPI) has measured the power and influence of all countries worldwide. For this 2022 edition, Algeria has retreated on the international scene to find itself in the 75th position out of 120 countries.
The GSPI considered Algeria less influential than countries such as Rwanda, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Jamaica and Malta.
According to the GSPI, Morocco is considered much more influential, ranking 46th globally. Algeria is also far from being able to compete with Egypt, which ranked first in Africa (31st), followed by South Africa (34th).
In the MENA region, Algeria ranked barely 8th among the 15 listed countries, after the United Arab Emirates (15th globally), Israel (23rd), Saudi Arabia (24th), Egypt (31st), Kuwait (36th), and Morocco (46th). Algeria (75th) is only better than Tunisia (76th).
The GSPI 2022 does, at the same time, not include Mauritania and Libya because of their chronic weaknesses that exclude them from this world ranking of the most influential countries.
The UAE is ranked as the top country in the MENA region in terms of global influence; as a small country of fewer than 10 million people located along the Arabian Gulf, it rose to tenth in this new ranking of 120 countries in the world. The UAE is one of the ten most influential and powerful countries worldwide.
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Deep in the Algerian desert, a Sahrawi-run event puts Western Sahara’s struggle for liberation on the big screen. 25 November 2022 The image above is of GOV.UK By Ariel Sophia Bardi, a freelance writer and photographer based in Rome. AUSERD REFUGEE CAMP, Algeria—At about 10 p.m., in the middle of the Sahara desert, just two lights […]
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