New Research Shows the Need for "Human-Centric" Skills

The new research study, Project Management Skills for Value Delivery, has been published and the executive summary is available for download. There's a wealth of new findings to think about in this study, which was (by coincidence!) perfectly timed to address a lot of the questions and worries released on the project management community by the advent of ChatGPT and other AI products.  At the end of March, I pulled out a few salient points to create a presentation I called "The Strategic Project Leader: Consultative Skills for Organizational Agility," which was offered on the Great IT Pro platform. Here's a snippet of what we talked about under the heading "Take the Leap!":

Just as the difference between the Sixth edition of the PMBOK® Guide and the Seventh edition demonstrated a major conceptual leap, the difference between the lists of technical skills and process mastery that has characterized project management in the past, and the higher-order skills we inquired about in this study is also a big leap.

These leaps are driven by a changing marketplace for project managers. We used to say that project management was a balance between art and science, with the science represented by things like scheduling, cost estimation, earned value analysis and risk analysis.  Today, most if not all of the science aspects of project management are fair game for AI applications.

However, there are huge areas open for human beings to show their quality, and to confound machine learning. Where we manage with creativity, humor, kindness, and curiosity, humans are irreplaceable. And the importance of what we once, rather stupidly, brushed off as “soft skills” has already become more and more central in project management. That’s why PMI added Stakeholder Management as a tenth knowledge area—and why soon after that, they stopped talking about managing and controlling stakeholders and started talking about engaging them.

Going forward, I would say that there are three major areas of personal and professional growth that all project managers should focus on:

 1. Mastery of self and of interpersonal relations. I wrote about how Emotional Intelligence (EQ) has made inroads into project management practice in a previous blog on this site. Allied to the self-mastery aspects of EQ is the mastery of how we interact with others. A great dead of self-knowledge is required to deal thoughtfully with other people in a team/professional setting. Understanding our own biases and blind spots, as well as our strengths, is the first step in developing the listening and communication skills that make great project leaders.

2. Mastery of performance measurement and management. Performance can be measured by AI. But only the human mind has the creative ability to look at the big picture and figure out what an organization’s aspirations ought to be and how to devise measures that will tell you when or if you are making progress. It’s  in the development of performance measurement systems—not the collection or analysis—that the consultant-project manager must excel. And by performance I am not talking merely about project performance. I’m talking about making the connections between, for example, the successful delivery of a project and its impact on the organization as a whole. Here we are shading over into benefits realization management—another area where AI might be able to keep track of the data—but only humans can decide what overall purpose work is meant to achieve, and how they will know what success means.

3. Commitment to value and innovation. Finally, AI is only as good as the people that design it. So committing yourself to embracing new ideas, radical kinds of self-improvement, and deep understanding of what “value” means in the context of your work … this is what will future-proof humanity’s role in organizations.

There's much more to come about this research study, in the form of articles, a white paper, webinars and a PMI Global Congress presentation, so follow us on Linked In and Twitter for the latest links to our content.