Where have the job ads for Project managers vanished?
Re-look at a software Project Manager's scope in 2024 era of digital transformation
Dear Readers,
In this edition of the news-letter, I discuss 5 key points related to the mid-career job role of a “senior project manager”. Hope you like this edition and feel free to forward this newsletter and share in your whatsapp group if you think it can help someone.
I discuss the below points on the impact of the PM job role in 2024:
The resourcing scale and time to deploy has now changed
Onsite offshore model vs rise of GCC’s
Changes in resource spectrum
No more scope mamnagement but value management
Demand impact on PM job
Regards,
Anirban.
In one summer of 2005, working as a team lead, I was in awe of my Project manager. He used to be a role model and would drive a Honda City at work. This seemed very inspiring for me while coming from a very modest background in a sleepy old charm town near Darjeeling where I was born and spent my youth.
I wanted to be like that guy. I was a senior SAP consultant then.
I wanted to be the person talking to client, winning new orders and managing the team while throwing parties now and then.
Aspirations drive action and it was no different for me I worked my way very soon to becoming a tech lead and then a Project Manager below 30 years of age.
I did my PRINCE2 and then my PMP and in the next 5 years, I was a seasoned project manager marked for delivery of mid-scale IT projects mostly around Europe, Singapore and India by 2010.
Things started changing around 2012 odd- when there was a push for cloud embracement.
By 2015 it was apparent and the companies I was interacting with were all vocal about reskilling especially if you were a “pure” project manager.
There was a green carpet given if a project manager by then wanted to re-badge in solution architecture for example.
By 2023, it seemed that this role has almost become severely challenged and, in this newsletter, I will draw my personal observations on why this happened?
Point 1 – The resorcing scale and time to deploy changed
The era of IT from 1998 to circa 2010 was dominated by scale.
Projects were of mammoth scale.
I remember that in my job in Pune days, we used to have inter-module cricket in the same project team. Around 5000 engineers worked in the same account in the same building.
It was a massive scale!!
That changed post 2010.
The baseline concept of project management is scope, time and money. Both scope and time became short in cloud adoption.
The question naturally came why do you need so many PMs managing smaller time projects and work involving so less humans?
Point 2 – Onsite/Offshore vs GCC’s?
The customer became partners and build-operate-transfer was changed to co-locate, co-build and co-deliver. Let me explain this.
In the IT era, there was complete outsourcing. One company did the design, another one did the build and the 3rd only did Infra or testing. Something along those lines.
But in the cloud era, with complex scales almost disappearing at a fast rate, enterprises started building their own capability in India.
Now, the clients wanted to co-build with the IT players rather than just play the Governance hat.
This was followed by co-location of all resources at the GCC offices. So the impact comes off the PM role again as since the resources are all deployed at the client side(or at least the senior ones) then what remains the scope of a PM?
Point 3 – Change in resource spectrum
In the era of large-scale resourcing, the team spectrum was mostly freshers driven along with another layer of sub-5 years resources and more seniors deployed onsite.
This changed in the digital era which came after the cloud era. By the time it was 2018-19, the focus shifted towards digital transformation.
By now cloud, analytics, machine learning and big data are drivers to digitize the core of the enterprise engine.
The resources needed here were specialists. A group of 9 members were able to do a decent scale data modernization or build a RecSys.
The team members needed much more than day-to-day work guidance as they were already aware of what needed to be done. The role of an integrator of the work package was done by a senior consultant or managed by a Scrum lead once burn charts were planned.
Project management in this space seems to have overlapped with PMO.
Point 4 – Do you manage with scope or do you manage with business benefits?
In the digital era, it was no longer enough for the IS/IT or data teams to raise their hands and say – “our scope is delivered, and we are going to hand over this to support now”.
The investments were often mandated and strategic which needed the IT team to hang around longer to measure and deliver the benefits offered rather than the scope.
There was an impact of x-ops as well, for example ML-Ops which needed models and platforms to be retrained on data even after go-live due to predictions changing. Digital work is on-going whereas IT was waterfall/Agile/Go-live & support.
Hence, it impacted the senior project roles of both Solution architects and project managers who were not expected to act as business advisors or scope champions.
Point 5 – Impact on demand cycle.
All 4 points impacted the net demand for the project manager role in IT. Modern SaS and cloud players also added a lot of self-serve aspects which further reduce time to market and complexity at least compared to the previous decade.
With demands on the downside, the supply kept increasing as the companies were not able to change or adjust the inflight roles so rapidly.
This kept adding a significant number of project managers left in the job market and with a diminishing return.
Path ahead?
My way forward is to reskill and the first step towards that is self-discovery. A self-examination of strengths and interests can point in the right direction and a digitally competent professional with experience in project management can indeed be a vital addition in digital teams.
Some of the paths I can suggest are – Product Manager, Cloud roles, Product Owner, Data Stewards, Sales, General Management & consulting.
I hope you like this newsletter and feel free to ask me any questions. Please do like and share this as this motivates me to create more such content in future.
