How Will Big Data and Social Media Change the Nature of Project Management?

It has been perversely comforting over the last 30 years to
see that success or failure in managing projects is still determined by the
same issues.  Indeed, The
Seven Keys To Success framework, when it was conceived 15 years ago, explained
the fundamental basis for success or failure of every project in the previous
10 years of history of Coopers & Lybrand Consulting as well as Price
Waterhouse Consulting.  It has been in
wide-spread use continuously since then in PwC Consulting and now in IBM, and
has helped many Project Managers successfully navigate challenging engagements.  And yet there also remain too many times that
outcomes are not successful.  Inevitably,
the reasons – and the missed opportunities that would have altered the course
of history – are always understandable against that framework.

As I say, perversely comforting.

And yet there are some seismic tremors being felt in the
world of technology-driven projects that have even this old dog thinking he may
need to learn some new tricks.  I remain
convinced that the Seven Keys will continue to be relevant.  What I am curious about is how these two
phenomena – Big Data and Social Media for Business – might significantly change
the landscape over which our projects are conceived and executed.

Let’s start with Big Data. 
This isn’t just an enabling technology. 
This is an opportunity to profoundly change businesses – including the
business of government – by inventing new benefits arising from merging
and analyzing multiple sources of input, some of which are static, but many of which
are processed in real time or near-real time. 
Current examples include smarter
cities such as Rio de Janeiro.  Other
examples can be found in smarter
health care with personal monitors that send data in near-real time for
pattern diagnostics and alerts to health care providers.  What impact would those kinds of projects
have on our notion of methods, of business benefit realization, of the breadth
of stakeholder landscapes, and of mitigating technical risks?

Now consider social media. 
Beyond the Big Data aspects (e.g. mining Twitter and Google traffic for
behavioral patterns), I am intrigued by the prospects that might arise from crowd-sourcing.  How might a project engage a much broader set
of stakeholders to understand requirements or test user interfaces using social
media?  How might a project team find and
test technical solutions using social media? 
Will this, in fact, become the next wave in the realm of knowledge
management?  Who needs to capture knowledge
artifacts in searchable databases if you can connect in real time to the right
mind?

Whatever the future of projects and project management
bring, I am pretty confident that it will be quite different from the typical
project of today. 

I’m also pretty confident that five or ten years from now I
will still find our collective track records of success perversely comforting.