Let’s start a conversation: APM launches Projecting the Future

Let’s start a conversation: APM launches Projecting the Future

How do we keep up with the rate of change in the project management profession? What does the project manager of the future look like? And how do they help to shape the workplace for everybody else?

APM will ask these questions, among others, with its ‘big conversation’, Projecting the Future, which launches today at APM Project Management Conference in Manchester.

At the launch, Tim Banfield, chair of APM’s Projecting the Future group, will host a panel discussion on topics such as: how the profession can thrive in an AI and robotics-led world, how it should respond to climate change, and addressing issues created by a rapidly ageing population.

“Project professionals should be leading the way,” he says. “To do so, we have to actively shape the future. We need to be ambitious. I believe we need to be better at showing how we add value to the benefit of business and society as a whole. We need to challenge long-established ideas about managing and valuing the benefits of projects.”

Panellist Jo Stanford, head of the Corporate Portfolio Office at Health Education England, says that project managers must further develop the human element of the job in order to have an impact in the future: “Even construction and engineering projects need all those human dimensions. And for many more experienced PMs who learned their skills in the pre-digital age, understanding how younger people relate and communicate is also important.”

A discussion paper [‘Projecting the Future’] will be published at the launch, along with the first in a series of regular issue challenges. Projecting the Future will continue into 2020, through webinars, social media campaigns and various events later in 2019.

Want to get involved? Sign up to our webinar, Projecting the Future – a Big Conversation webinar, on 1 July.