In 5 years, how will you fit into the $20 trillion "project economy" | ONES Insights

The "project economy" is here.

According to Project Management Institute (PMI) estimates, five years from now, in 2027, at least 88 million people around the world will be engaged in project management-related jobs, and the value created by project-oriented economic activities will reach 20 trillion US dollars - 2021, China The total GDP is about 17.77 trillion US dollars. It can be seen that the development prospects of the project economy are comparable to that of the second largest economy in the world today.

These forecasts for the project economy were made before countries invested trillions of dollars in epidemic recovery projects, and the "post-epidemic era" will further accelerate the growth and scope of the project economy.

Experts judge that by 2025, in any industry or field, senior leaders and managers will spend 60% of their entire time on selecting, prioritizing and driving projects.

Projects will not only become the economic engine of this era, but also the basic model for realizing change and creating value. In China, Huawei, Xiaomi, Alibaba, Haier and ONES are five representative companies of "project-driven business". Among them, ONES is a professional project management researcher and a dedicated project management practitioner.

Project management has been around for a long time.

Projects have been around since the dawn of humanity. Project management today is the result of a natural evolutionary process that has existed throughout human history.

Hunting is arguably one of humanity's most primitive, project-based activities. Of course, as hunting activities became more frequent and people became proficient in the relevant skills, hunting changed from a project to a daily activity. After that, the first village, the first castle, the first irrigation system, the first wheel... all these ideas were realized through some kind of project.

The Great Wall of my country and the Pyramid of Khufu in Egypt are considered to be the earliest large-scale projects with symbolic significance in history. This is followed by large-scale civil engineering projects such as dams, bridges, tunnels and highways; then followed by large-scale landmark construction projects, including concert halls (such as the Sydney Opera House), sports venues (such as the stadium and other facilities for the Beijing Olympics) ), museums (such as the Guggenheim), and skyscrapers.

Today, we're talking about "megaprojects" -- including railways, airports, seaports, power plants, oil and gas extraction, public buildings, aerospace, and smart cities. From the Apollo space program in the United States to the modern urbanization process in China, to the large-scale software development in the digital age, all of them are the result of turning ideas into reality by means of projects.

The same is true in business operations. Roger Martin, former dean of the Rotman School of Management in Canada, said: "At least 80% and possibly as high as 95% of jobs are made up of various projects." He believes that, in fact, , In an organization, the whole process of decision-making should be regarded as a project, and managers should arrange their work and life with the project as the center.

Even a great technological achievement as we know it as the iPhone is, by its very nature, a brilliant project—and arguably the best business project ever.

In the middle of the night on November 7, 2004, Jobs received a call from Apple Vice President Michael Bell. After learning that it was a proposal to develop a smartphone, Jobs said, "Okay, I think we should do it." Since then, Apple has launched With the "Purple Project" (Project Purple), Jobs transferred Apple's best technical and management personnel, let them completely break away from their original job responsibilities, and devoted themselves to the purple project full-time.

Just two and a half years later, Apple, which had no previous mobile phone manufacturing experience, launched the epoch-making iPhone that redefines the mobile phone.

Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez, former president of the Project Management Association, said: "Project-based work is the engine that creates important achievements in human civilization, inspires society to move forward, and often breaks through long-standing scientific and cultural constraints. Fan Li."

For the past hundred years, Western businesses have all been organized in the same way, and their hierarchical structure has become one of the main barriers to innovation, growth and successful implementation of projects. For many businesses, changing organizational models has become a necessity for survival.

The American "Fortune" magazine once asserted: "Project management will become the core management model of the 21st century."

Change starts with "project thinking". IBM's head of talent once imagined that IBM no longer has the term "job description", but only "project description"; the Richards Group, the largest independent advertising company in the United States, revoked all management and job titles within the company, only Keep the position of project manager; Nike, UPS, Amazon and other companies describe them as “project managers” when recruiting for strategic functions.

At the same time, Chinese companies are exploring ways to modernize their organizations. In 2014, Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei said: "Huawei's current project management level is still very low, and there is a lot of waste. This is a drawback brought about by the functional department in the past. Huawei will then pilot a project department-centered management model. , and gradually make the combat team have more rights, supervise forward, and cooperate with the creation of the authorization system.”

Among them, the "Functional Department as the center" mentioned by Ren Zhengfei can be understood as "mainly using the operation management method". Enterprise management work can be divided into two categories: project and daily operation. Before the emergence of project management, whether it is daily operation work or project work, it is mostly managed by means of operation management. Once this method is used to manage project work, many management elements, such as scope, time, cost, quality, stakeholders, risk, communication, and team, may be ignored, thus failing to ensure the smooth realization of project goals.

Because there is a big difference between projects and daily operations, the use of operation management to manage project work lacks pertinence and effectiveness. Project management is an effective and effective method specially developed for the business form of projects. management style.

In the past ten years, Huawei has promoted the "Iron Triangle" project management model globally - it is said to refer to the "U.S. Army Iron Triangle". This is a core idea of the U.S. military reform in the 1990s to solve the problems of bureaucracy and low operational efficiency within the U.S. military.

The so-called "Iron Triangle" of Huawei means that there are three different roles in project management: customer manager, product manager, and delivery manager.

Account managers are responsible for business relationships, including quotations, maintaining customers, and dredging the relationship between all parties, etc., dealing with various uncertainties in cooperation;

Product manager is to help customers to solve customer problems in terms of function, performance, compatibility, and compatibility, and to deal with the problem of improving product competitiveness;

The delivery manager is responsible for delivery and post-maintenance, delivering the services promised to customers on schedule, improving customer satisfaction, and dealing with the deterministic problem of how to fulfill cooperation.

Although they perform their own duties in the division of labor, the Iron Triangle is a whole, facing the same customer, and their interests are closely tied together.

The "iron triangle" strategy sounds simple, but it is very difficult to implement. In the past ten years, many companies have learned this model and have not adhered to it.

The book "Project Revolution" presents the practical cases of three Chinese companies, Xiaomi, Alibaba and Haier.

Xiaomi drives its organizational model through projects: the company's various products in the market are not organized in strategic business units or become part of an organizational hierarchy; Xiaomi's organizational structure is relatively flat, with each The development of new products is regarded as a project and can be achieved by mobilizing internal and external resources of the company.

Alibaba does not guide the development of new products and the implementation of projects from the top down. "Project Revolution" believes that Alibaba plays the role of a "gravity supplier" and network coordinator. The interdependence between companies, ventures, and projects in the Alibaba ecosystem is not just based on finance and equity, but also on growth strategies, investment approaches, product offerings, business synergies, and resource sharing. Relationship. Startups in this ecosystem can afford to lose, and their failure will not have a serious impact on the sustainability of the entire ecosystem.

Since 2010, Haier has established a unique project organization platform across the company. The company first canceled the strategic business department and management level, and formed three project units with specific focuses: the first project unit focuses on the development, marketing and production of new products, which is the department closest to users; the second project unit is organized around corporate administrative support functions, such as human resources, accounting and legal; the third project unit is the executive team, whose role has been redefined as: the function that supports the customer-facing self-organizing project organization.

The common feature of these three Chinese enterprise cases is the pursuit of the ultimate goal of zero-distance contact with customers. In addition to improving responsiveness, it also enables organizations to explore customer-approved solutions through experimental methods. More and more Chinese companies are becoming "design thinkers": Facing a highly dynamic market, Chinese companies have to be as close to their customers as possible, so as to be project-oriented and design the organization as a flexible system.

As Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez believes, senior management, and even the management of any professional and interpersonal relationship, is project management, and the project is the lingua franca of the business and personal world.

In late 2021, Harvard Business Review's cover story titled "The Arrival of the Project Economy" noted that organizations have evolved and the number of projects has grown exponentially, while project management has remained stagnant—most of the things we use today The project management method was formed between the 1970s and 1980s, reflecting the pursuit of efficiency and standardization in operations management.

Project managers who follow the traditional model focus too much on inputs and outputs—including planning, estimation, cost, time, scale, risk management—and less on outcomes and value—including goals, rationale, benefits, impact, and strategy. They don't pay much attention to what happens before and after the project is completed. They only care about the deliverables, and feel that if the project is completed on schedule and within budget, the expected benefits will naturally be obtained.

In the early 2000s, the Internet and new technologies brought together an explosion of change, and agile methods gradually replaced rigid traditional project management methods.

ONES, which is deeply involved in software R&D management tools, is a professional project management researcher. The company believes that businesses need toolkits that encompass a variety of methodologies — from agile and traditional project management to design thinking, change management, and product development — and that the ability to use these tools must be cultivated across the organization. ability.

In this way, it is not only to work in the way of project management, but also how to think in the way of project management.

Projects cannot be performed by machines, project work must be done by humans. Especially software development projects, whose complexity stems from the abstraction and construction of conceptual models, and this activity belongs to the creative activities of intelligence, then, software development project management is actually the management of people - ONES has been established since the very beginning. established this awareness.

In the process of digitalization, software plays an important basic supporting role. ONES provides software R&D management tools to all walks of life, and has rapidly grown into a leader in the R&D management track and No. 1 in the industry category.

The book "Agile Software Development" describes software development as "a positive-sum game about innovation and communication." Whether you can play this game well depends on each individual in the game and the communication and collaboration between them.

The American Project Management Association recommends that project managers spend more than 75% of their time communicating. It can be seen that communication is the foundation of teamwork.

In fact, ONES has made an attempt to instrument, systematize and standardize the ancient problem of "communication", and promote large-scale collaborative scientific management experiments. As such, ONES is a dedicated project management practitioner.

Times are projecting. "Everyone is a project manager," said Masayoshi Son, founder of SoftBank. As the Project Manifesto, the final chapter of The Project Revolution, states: “In this new reality of accelerated change, more and more aspects of our lives are driven by projects, more and more aspects of organizations are becoming projects, and Projects have thus become an essential element in everyone’s career and life journey.”