Tag: Business Trends

Business Trends to Watch in 2022

Business trends in 2022

Understanding upcoming trends in 2022 help with refocus personal development. Some trends have been identified and there is an expectation organizations will continue to  experience growth in Project Management, Business Analysis, Agile, Data Science, and Leadership in the year ahead. Overall, the theme of working remotely comes through loud and clear and is expected to impact almost every area.

Project Managers as Project Leaders, The recognition that project managers are both leaders and managers is not new, but the need for the leadership aspect of the role has intensified in the last couple of years and will continue to do so in 2022. In fact, more organizations are using the title project leader as opposed to project manager.

The technical aspects of the job such as scheduling, budgeting, and tracking haven’t been eliminated, but the need for skills like influencing, facilitating, communicating and other “soft” skills associated with the PM as leader has become paramount. Project managers as leaders are going to continue to be challenged in 2022 with distributed teams and all the distractions of ever-changing global and work environments. Leading the team and engaging stakeholders to sustain buy-in is going to continue to be job one for effective PMs in 2022.

Expect to see a continued increase in the use of project management tools beyond the standard Microsoft Office suite. Whether because people are working remotely, tools have become more cost effective, or tools have become more accessible and easier to use, more organizations using PM-specific tools with a wider variety of tools, as well.

At first this may seem contradictory to the previous trend of project leadership getting emphasized over project management; tools are not generally used for the leadership aspects of the PM role. Whatever the reason, 2022 will be a robust year for PM tool implementation.

There should be stronger facilitation and communication skills for remote business analysts. This means getting better at communicating and facilitating in a virtual environment. Learn how to build trust when unable to directly “see” stakeholders daily. The ability to virtually facilitate, elicit inclusive requirements and not just those from a few vocal stakeholders. Learn to creatively collaborate with team members, colleagues, and key stakeholders to ensure their buy-in.

BAs need to think about communicating and facilitating with more intention. This calls for mindful facilitation as opposed to simply the ability to use Microsoft Teams, Slack, or other communication platforms. More BAs should focus on learning how to create safe, trust-laden, and collaborative environments within which stakeholders readily share information in a world that has been changed forever.

Digital transformation has been a trend for some years, and it is still going full steam ahead however has tended to fail because;

  • NOT understanding the business problem.
  • NOT determining success criteria so organizations have no way of knowing if the initiative has been successful because there was not a shared understanding of what success looked like.
  • NOT realizing that digital transformation introduces cultural changes in the organization.

Because of these failures, organizations moving toward digital transformation will rely more on business analysis capabilities to effectively address root causes. BAs will be used on digital transformation initiatives to ensure the business problem or opportunity has been fully analysed and understood, to verify that the organization is ready to adopt the new culture, and to identify overall success measures as well as identifying smaller, incremental success measures that can be measured throughout the project.

These efforts will also require a business analyst’s in-depth knowledge of agile business analysis approaches, tools, and techniques that will be critical as organizations strive to become more agile in their ability to respond to customers and competitors.

It can be argued that the COVID 19 pandemic did more to transform the world of work than any document, framework, certification approach or technology. One of the lasting impacts of the pandemic is that distributed teams are here to stay. Product development team members and their leaders will need to permanently adjust to working in a distributed fashion.

While many still share the perception that all Agile frameworks require co-located teams, technology has advanced to the point where a team adopting a framework doesn’t need to all be in the same location. Continued discipline, particularly in the area of communication and team working together agreements, will be required as teams shift from distributed work by necessity to distributed work by choice.

The marketplace continues to see the emergence and growth of a number of Agile scaling frameworks. The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), Large Scale Scrum (LeSS), Scrum at Scale (S@S) and Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) are just a few of the prominent entries in this space. Next year will see organizations continue to adopt these frameworks as they seek to realize the benefits of being more responsive to change at a global level.

Increasing application of artificial intelligence and reinforcement learning is one of the trends that will change the world. This past year certainly validates that sentiment, and 2022 will continue to see evidence of this powerful trend. The application of AI and reinforcement learning will definitely be a trend to keep an eye on, as the progress has increased exponentially, especially with the huge strides made in Natural Language Processing.

These are just a few business trends identified and we are sure there are more on the horizon. Let us know what you think the business trends will be in 2022, what will influence the organisational landscape in the year to come. Let us know your thoughts we would like to hear from you, all the best on your project management journey.