UMD Virtual Project Management Symposium 2022

Thriving in Complexity through Strategic Resilience and Agility

In today’s VUCA world with the ever-increasing complexity and need for agility and flexibility, project professionals are increasingly facing challenges to deliver projects on their targets. This is mainly caused by today’s growing business dynamics and frequently changing messages, and consequently also by a rising number of unforeseen disruptive events that have the potential to derail projects. 

Today’s methods of responding to such unexpected events are outdated and have become ineffective with today’s types of risk and uncertainty. In fact, projects are generally insufficiently protected and are struggling to bounce back from disruption and turbulence. The result is often a survival mode with a lack of valuable project outcomes while project failures are consistently increasing, costing organizations billions of wasted dollars every single year, only to proceed to the next project without progressing or learning.

But instead of defending against the unknown and applying a strategy of hope, fear, or ignorance, the key to effective project resilience and agility is to turn uncertainty into an asset and an opportunity for project management as a discipline to grow and thrive in the long term. Projects need to become more robust and resilient to bounce back from unexpected events while evolving towards a truly value-driven project management practice. 

In this presentation, Marcus Glowasz will outline the necessary skills of openness, adaptability, innovation, agility, and a mindset of growth along with uncertainty, to turn threats into opportunities and re-establish project delivery confidence and performance.

Key Takeaways:

• The importance and urgency to adopt innovative and disruptive thinking in today’s VUCA reality
• How project professionals can drive project management evolution and success through analytical thinking, data literacy, and an innovative mindset
• How to assess and identify gaps in current project management practices, and apply steps towards improved project delivery confidence and performance