Authors: Mariia Borsuk / Lenka Pincot PMP, PMI-ACP, PMI-PBA

Navigating the Digital Era: How Project Managers Enable Sustainable Growth?

In the fast-paced world of digital advancements, project managers are becoming pivotal navigators, steering organizations toward sustainable growth. PMI Switzerland's strategy is designed to help you smoothly sail in the modern business environment. Renowned for our commitment to equipping professionals with essential skills and knowledge, we ensure project managers are not mere participants but leaders in the digital revolution. Lenka Pincot, Chief of Staff to the PMI CEO and an expert with 20 years of experience in connecting business strategies to IT innovations enlightened the topic and shared invaluable insights in the recently hosted event.

Challenges of the Digital Era

The speaker guided the audience through the challenges brought forth by the digital era, such as long-term strategy foresight amidst rapid technological changes, management of constant transformation, and ensuring effective communication and collaboration in a global environment. Lenka highlighted the importance of understanding and adapting to global contexts, making strategic adjustments, and efficiently increasing value for customers, partners, and the community to address these challenges. “Transformation became a new norm,” – emphasized she.

The Evolving Role of Project Managers

The presentation continued with delivering a thorough overview of how evolving challenges induced the transformation of the project manager role: it is not confined to traditional task management anymore but requires a blend of project management skills and new-age strategic capabilities, such as collaborative leadership and problem-solving. Lenka mentioned - “tackling what is on top of the CEOs’ minds can boost career opportunities,” and as research shows, helping organizations navigate through digital disruptions and geopolitical and economic changes is a priority.  In light of this, Lenka also emphasized the imperative of embedding agility within teams and organizations to be able to respond to the challenges of the Digital Era.

Embracing Emotional Intelligence

While recognizing the  plethora of advantages AI provides us, the speaker underscored - “digital technologies can bring a lot of value, but the more we use them, the more we need to care about being human.” A number of human aspects, such as lack of leadership and communication, poor engagement with stakeholders, unrealistic expectations, and inadequate vision, all lead to project failure. Emotional Intelligence (EI) remains irreplaceable in project management.

Conclusion: A Convergence of Technology and Human Expertise

While project managers must harness their EI to navigate through the challenges and opportunities presented by the digital transformation, Lenka stressed, that the true power lies in the collaboration between technology and human professionals. The event underscored the significance of reimagining strategies and provided a roadmap for project managers to gain a competitive edge and thrive in the Digital Era.