For any successful project management, social systems are vital. Everyone knows good project management depends on clear roles and responsibilities, teamwork and communication between the people involved. But APM’s Body of Knowledge, in its foundational knowledge resource, suggests a need to reflect on the emerging view that projects are social systems.

The APM Scottish conference speakers represented some of the UK’s most complex and high profile projects. As project complexity grows so the project management profession needs to grow its body of PMs equipped to take on the exciting challenges of the future.

Padmini Murthy recently wrote about the DevOps ecosystem partly based on a recent DevOps.com survey. It’s all about the role new technologies play in supporting DevOps, like automation and machine learning. New technologies are rapidly shaping the way companies address Security and Application Performance Monitoring and they need to be used effectively.

So what could blockchain do for project management documents? In any project management portfolio, the documents and signatures that confirm and approve parts of the process are vital. Back in 1990, the PDF file format was created by Adobe Systems to share richly formatted documents whose visual layout, text and graphics would look the same, no matter which software created them or where they were viewed or printed. By 2008 PDF specification had become an international standard.

If you are interested in improving project handover sign up for the APM webinar on Thursday 12 April 2018. The Webinar will be led by Owen Anthony and you can find out all about it through the APM website. This webinar will also be recorded and turned into a resource that will be made available afterwards for those not able to attend the webinar live.

System thinking is a discipline for seeing holes. It is a framework for seeing the interrelationships between things rather than just the things themselves. It is about having an eye for seeing patterns rather than static ‘snapshots’. For managing complex projects managerial leaders are needed who can understand systems and the benefits that systems thinking can bring.

There can be no doubt that the pace of tech innovation has accelerated, spurring their companies to increase capital spending. Steve Cox, who works with CFOs as Oracle group vice president of ERP (enterprise resource planning) and EPM (enterprise performance management) product marketing, says the following five technology-oriented areas will be critical: