Across businesses small and large, a vast portion of everyday work fits under the umbrella of a project even though it may not be organized according to the rules of traditional PM. No longer are “projects” firmly in the domain of Project Management Professionals (PMP) who view PM as a way to control and manage a project using task lists and Gantt charts. Whereas once PMPs had the responsibility to facilitate and organize work across an organization, this now falls to most people within a company across a number of different and distinct lines of business.

At the heart of the new project management (let’s call it PM 2.0) is collaboration, and people now are defining a project as any work undertaken to achieve a business objective. When we start to think of projects as based on collaboration -– instead of on control -– a new approach to managing projects emerges.

The need for shared insight and the ability to look across the board and see things holistically is at the forefront of PM 2.0. With insight and collaboration driving a project, people and businesses are accomplishing much more than when they relied on silos of information that were built around control and an adherence to traditional PM rules that fit work around a PM system, rather than the PM system fitting around the work.

This shift in project management is similar to the change that took place in word processing. Whereas once you would hand a document or notes to someone for them to type up, we now have a variety of word processing tools that empower the people within an organization to take that responsibility themselves.

However, this transition to PM 2.0 has not been seamless –- organizations have been giving business people PM responsibilities without realizing they don’t speak the language of the old PM.

Today, businesses need to look to leaders within their organization who can drive toward a common business objective and are willing to collaborate to get there. Since teams are spread over so many different boundaries (geographic, organizational, objectives, etc.), collaboration becomes the key component to PM 2.0.

Multiple Components of Collaboration

One of main problems with the historical approach to project management is that relegating PM responsibilities to a specific person -– someone who often is separate from the mundane aspects of a given project -– simply is too costly. To control expenses, organizations end up infusing the PMP DNA into people with less-technical roles.

For example, when non-technical people cobble together a Gantt, it falls out of use when the project begins because they don't know how to effectively maintain it. The main idea behind a Gantt chart was to create a visualization tool to communicate work schedules, not a means to run schedules. However, the original intent and end goal of the Gantt remains -– to drive to success -– so now various components of collaboration must become the tools of PM 2.0.

What does this mean for businesses? Take the example of a marketing project -– most people initially would think of implementing a solution like Microsoft Project to track and organize the "who, whats and whens" of all that needs to get done, if only because the name of the software would seem to fit the bill.