Amazon Web Services is adding a home-grown NoSQL database to its ever-expanding roster of cloud computing offerings. DynamoDB is what Amazon CTO Werner Vogels called a “fully managed” NoSQL implementation the company built and tested over the years.

The demand for NoSQL databases is booming with the growth of big data and web applications: something of which Amazon and other tech providers are well aware. Amazon already offers a range of relational database services and SimpleDB, another home-grown, non-relational database, which is easy to use and powerful but has some domain scaling limitations. But NoSQL is built to scale along with unstructured web data and is also suited for the distributed nature of web applications.

Modern “high-volume applications require a simple data model but low latency and high-frequency processing,” Vogels said in an interview. NoSQL is great for social gaming and web applications but is also critical for the big data applications demanded by business today, he said. Such applications require the collection and analysis of not only in-house transactional data, but also information coming in over the transom from many sources — Twitter, Facebook, email, office documents — and in many formats.

DynamoDB uses the sheer scale of AWS to spread a customer’s data across enough hardware to achieve the scale needed and, unlike the other database services, DynamoDB will use solid state drives (SSDs) to assure very fast data access, Vogels said. Here is Vogel’s blog about the news.

DynamoDB has been beta tested for months by select customers, including Reed Elsevier and SmugMug. The company also moved its own Amazon Cloud Drivemetadata from an unspecified relational database to DynamoDB before the holidays to handle the anticipated spike in traffic, partially driven by the new Kindle Fire, Vogels said.

Amazon opted to build its own NoSQL because it had so much database experience from its own massive operations, Vogels said.  There are no plans to offer additional, third-party NoSQL options, but Vogels said the company will respond to customer demand.

“In the past, businesses [that used tools like this] had to manage their hardware, their replication, their batching and clustering manually, but with DynamoDB, we’ll take care of all of this for you,” Vogels said. The developer can add or subtract database capacity, transactions per second and other features by turning a dial on the AWS Management Console, he added.

A “perpetual” free tier of the DynamoDB service with storage and a set number of reads and writes per month will be offered, said Adam Selipsky, VP of product management for AWS. Amazon typically offers a try-before-you-buy level of its services, but some of them, like the new free Windows EC2 micro-instances  announced this week, time out after a year.

With the availability of DynamoDB, Amazon shows its willingness to keep rolling out significant new capabilities as demand requires.

Amazon will let customers run free micro-instances of Microsoft Windows 2008 R2 on its EC2 service starting now, according to a new post to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) blog.

Such try-before-you-buy tactics have helped Amazon win converts to its cloud platform by letting them test new or existing applications in its cloud for free. While Amazon offers a choice of operating systems, Microsoft licensing constraints have made running Windows workloads on AWS more expensive than running them on Linux.

In his post, Amazon Web Services Evangelist Jeff Barr wrote:

The micro instances provide a small amount of consistent processing power and the ability to burst to a higher level of usage from time to time. You can use this instance to learn about Amazon EC2, support a development and test environment, build an AWS application, or host a web site (or all of the above). We’ve fine-tuned the micro instances to make them even better at running Microsoft Windows Server.

The AWS Free Usage Tier has, until now, let customers run small instances of Linux or other Amazon services for free for 750 hours per month as a way to let customers kick the tires of its cloud-based services. The “micro instances” for 32- or 64-bit  Linux and now Windows can utilize 613 MB of memory. Customers can use the free usage tier for a year, according to Amazon.

Users of this free usage tier have access to Amazon S3, Elastic Block Store, Elastic Load Balancing and AWS data transfer services. The new Windows Server free usage instances are available across AWS regions, except for the GovCloud.

This news comes at an interesting time. Amazon’s popular Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Microsoft’s Azure Platform-as-a-Service are increasingly competing: Amazon is adding more PaaS-like capabilities and Microsoft is working on IaaS capabilities like its promised VM role. Both companies plan web briefings this week on their cloud strategies: Microsoft has a webcast slated for Tuesday; Amazon hosts one on Wednesday.

As more companies weigh putting workloads onto public or private clouds, hold on for more competitive moves by these cloud giants.

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thePlatform is pushing cross-platform compatibility with a new offering that will let its customers create one video player that can be delivered to any device or browser that is trying to access it. That capability is being rolled out due to increased demand for HTML5 video, despite a lack of real standards across browsers for the display and rendering of video players.

“The big thing that has changed… is that just about every media company has an HTML5 player out or on their roadmap,” thePlatform CEO Ian Blaine told me in a phone interview. “I can’t think of a single company that hasn’t adopted HTML5 as part of its mix.”

Blaine says that HTML5 has better cross-device support than other options, especially when you take iOS devices into account. The problem is that, although the HTML5 video tag is widely supported amongst all modern browsers, it’s also rendered differently depending on which browser a viewer is using, and in some cases, on which version of a browser that’s being used. That means that publishers frequently have to put extra effort into setting up HTML5 players to ensure that they work as designed.

It’s that sort of individual browser tweaking that thePlatform hopes to eliminate with video players that will work in any browser. Customers can build players with the thePlatform’s Player Dev Kit and view changes in a real-time preview pane. And once a customer has customized its player, it will work over a number of platforms without any further development necessary. thePlatform’s smart player will automatically detect the device and browser being used and automatically serve up the correct video assets in Flash or HTML5 depending on the viewing environment.

thePlatform’s offering also has one advantage over some other video players, in that it has figured out how to make mid-roll ads work in HTML5, which has proven to be a stumbling block for some publishers. According to Blaine, that meant publishers were either stuck monetizing their content only with pre-rolls — which basically was leaving money on the table — or stitching ads into the videos, which removed the ability to serve up dynamic or targeted video ads, neither of which was an acceptable outcome.

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Apple: launches interactive textbooks for the iPad

The textbooks, available via the new iBooks 2 app, include animations, diagrams and video. The books will not carry advertising.

The tech giant, which unveiled its new education apps during an event in New York yesterday, has partnered with education publishers including Pearson, McGraw-Hill and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt to produce interactive textbooks, priced at around $14.99 (£9.69).

Phillip Schiller, senior vice president of worldwide marketing, said the textbooks provide a “more dynamic, engaging and interactive” way for students to learn.

“Education is deep in Apple’s DNA and iPad may be our most exciting education product yet.”

“With 1.5 million iPads already in use in education institutions, including over 1,000 one-to-one deployments, iPad is rapidly being adopted by schools across the US and around the world,” he said.

Apple has also launched iBooks Author app, which enables anyone with a Mac to create and self-publish a range of books, including textbooks, cook books, history books and picture books, and add interactive features to them.

The company has come under fire from some critics, however, as books authored using the new tool can only be sold via Apple digital outlets.

Apple already hosts more than 20,000 educational apps in the App Store and also promotes the use of iPads in classrooms as an educational tool, by connecting to big screens.

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H&M: to feature David Beckham in Superbowl ad

The David Beckham Bodywear collection will launch on February 2, in store and online, three days before the Superbowl.

The clothes collection is made up of a range of underwear styles, including briefs, boxers, T-shirts,  pyjamas and long johns.

Beckham, a global fashion icon, has previously appeared in major ad campaigns for Adidas, PepsiCo, Gillette and Sainsbury’s.

The move marks a significant ramping up of H&M’s advertising offer, as it is previously not known for spending heavily on TV advertising.

H&M’s advertisement are all produced in-house, with the use of independent creative professionals.

The Beckham commercial will have a prime position in the second quarter of the game.

H&M has used a number of celebrities in the past including Cindy Crawford and Elle McPherson.

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Protests against the proposed anti-piracy bill SOPA, combined with a recent statement from the Obama administration criticizing the legislation, seem to have had some effect. Reports out of Washington say the bill has been put on hold indefinitely, until some kind of “consensus” can be reached. Is this a victory? Not quite. Government watchers say this move could be just a delaying tactic, and note that an equally unfavorable bill called PIPA is going ahead in the Senate. As a result, many of those planning to stage web “blackouts” in protest of the legislation are continuing with their efforts, including Wikipedia.

As Stacey noted last week, the list of those planning to go dark on Jan. 18 to protest the bill that some say could “break the Internet” has been growing longer since word of the protest first emerged over the past couple of weeks. The online community Reddit has committed to shut down, as has I Can Has Cheezburger humor network and the tech blog Boing Boing — and on Monday, the co-founder of Wikipedia said the English version of the user-edited encyclopedia would also join the fight.

Reports that the SOPA legislation had been shelved — just days after the bill’s chief sponsor, Rep. Lamar Smith, agreed to remove one of the bill’s most controversial elements (the requirement that ISPs remove offending websites from the central domain-name system) — led some to believe the law was effectively dead, but a number of observers have questioned that assumption. Among them is O’Reilly Media founder Tim O’Reilly, who said on Twitter that reports of SOPA’s demise“are premature” and those protesting against the legislation should “keep up the fight.”

In an interview with GigaOM’s Colleen Taylor last week, O’Reilly said he was fighting the legislation because he doesn’t believe piracy is the kind of problem that requires a draconian legal solution. Instead, O’Reilly argues that the media and entertainment companies that have spent so much time lobbying for SOPA and PIPA should focus on adapting their business models for the digital age.

SOPA may be shelved, but PIPA is still very much alive

Wales also told his followers on Twitter that SOPA was far from dead, and noted that the Senate version of the anti-piracy legislation — which is known as the PROTECT-IP Act or PIPA — is “still going strong.” And according to Wales, who quoted a source in Washington, the bill’s sponsor has made it clear he plans to bring the legislation to the floor for a vote (although Senator Patrick Leahy has proposed that the Senate should also reconsider the DNS aspect of the bill that’s expected to make its way to the floor for comment next week).

Despite the moves by Wikipedia and other sites to go dark in protest (and similar efforts aimed at getting people to change their Twitter avatars, which have been spearheaded by Google staffer Hunter Walk), not everyone is convinced a blackout is the right approach: Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, for one, said closing a global business in reaction to that kind of political issue is foolish. In followup messages, Costolo said Twitter has “been very active and will continue to be very active” in protesting SOPA and PIPA, but didn’t provide any specifics.

Meanwhile, Reddit plans to continue with its blackout, and members of the online community argue that the shelving of SOPA is just a bargaining tactic — in other words, the government is hoping if it gives the impression it has caved in to criticism, it can somehow generate more support for the Senate version of the legislation, in a kind of bait-and-switch move.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation also said that despite the Obama administration’s criticism of SOPA, and the agreement to remove the DNS-blocking provision(or at least reconsider it), the “fight is still far from over.” The non-profit agency said while SOPA had been shelved, its proponents could easily try to revive it, and the very similar Senate bill PIPA was still expected to come to the floor next week. Both bills “must be stopped if we want to protect free speech and innovation on the web,” the EFF said.

Whether the protests planned by Reddit and Wikipedia will have any long-term effect on the legislative support for either SOPA or PIPA is still a question mark, of course — and so is the fate of a proposed bi-partisan alternative to the two bills known as OPEN, which is sponsored by two of the most prominent SOPA and PIPA critics, Sen. Ron Wyden and Rep. Darrell Issa. Will that bill get any more interest from Silicon Valley as a viable solution to piracy, or will it suffer the same fate as its predecessors?

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A project manager’s prime task is managing a project to success. The products of the project need to be picked up by the line organisation, and if this involves change in the organisation or ways of working, the changes must be made to ’stick’. By ensuring that the responsibilities for project management and business change are well assigned in a project there is an increased chance of success.

The Dilemma
In all projects assigning the correct project manager is crucial. The choice is often not simple. I have experienced this in the form of a dilemma: do we appoint someone who is an experienced project manager or someone who will champion the change? Very often the experienced project manager will come from a technical background, e.g. IT, and will not have authority to make changes in the organisation or processes. On the other hand the change champion will have credibility with the business unit, but often not have the project skills required. If you can always find all of this in one person, then good luck to you; you don’t need the rest of this article!

When is This a Problem?
There can be a problem in a project that is not part of a programme. Let’s look at the differences between programmes and projects. I’ll use MSP™ (Managing Successful Programmes of the OGC) to illustrate. MSP clearly differentiates between projects – that deliver outputs – and programmes – that deliver outcomes. The main difference is that a project that is not part of a programme delivers the output to the line organisation; the line management is subsequently responsible for achieving the benefits (outcomes). A programme, on the other hand, is also responsible for the benefits realisation of the projects within the programme.

I have noticed, in our organisation at least, that projects are expected to deliver the change in the organisation, so the outcome is not achieved if the project only delivers the output.

How Does it go Wrong?
To ensure a good mix of business change and project management, for IT projects, we have in the past staffed projects with a project manager from the customer, a “business PM” or BPM, and an experienced project manager from IT, the “IT PM”, reporting to them. This can work well, depending on the individuals and how well they cooperate and complement each other. But if the BPM doesn’t have the required project management capabilities there can be a conflict of authority: the BPM is in charge – the “boss” – but the IT PM needs to tell them what to do and how to do it. Hoping that the BPM and IT PM will complement each other and work well together is not enough, we have seen this go bad a large number of times. Roles and responsibilities, especially for the project management tasks, is the foundation of a project and if that goes wrong it is very difficult to correct. So it’s best to get it right at the start. Having more than one person in a project with a role of “project manager” is confusing. There should only be one. This can be resolved by only giving the overall project manager this role and the IT PM is called an “IT work stream lead” or “IT team lead”. Some IT project managers have great difficulty accepting this; after all it says “Project Manager” on their business card, and they expect that to appear as their role in every project as well. Of course a project role and a job title are completely different things, but we have found that this “role inflation” has crept into the way people see project roles. My goal was to ensure that when a project was setup, it had a good foundation to be successful. Of course the project team members still need to work together well to be successful, but giving the team a good foundation allows them to focus on delivering together, instead of trying to work out who they should listen to. I started looking for a solution to this dilemma.

What did I Find?
My analysis led me to the conclusion that we needed a capable and experienced project manager to be responsible for the project management, and someone with the right authority and “organisational credit” to be responsible for the change in the business. As the experienced project managers available for our IT projects are nearly always from IT they do not have the authority or credit in the customer’s organisation. And the main customer contacts, the potential candidates for the BPM role, often don’t have the project management capabilities. Looking at how MSP describes the programme structure, the key players are the SRO (Senior Responsible Owner), the Programme Manager and the BCM (Business Change Manager). The key here is that the BCM does not report to the Programme Manager or vice versa; and that the Programme Manager is responsible for the day-to-day management of the programme while the BCM is responsible for delivering change and benefits. Why couldn’t this work in a project as well? With a team of project managers I worked through the roles and responsibilities in a typical project, with the aim of making this work. The project managers were motivated in this too, as they had experienced the problem first hand! The result was a proposed project structure as shown in figure 1.

Figure 1: Proposed Project Structure

To explain to the Steering Group, other stakeholders, the project manager and BCM how the responsibilities are split over the project manager and BCM, we have also developed a RACI matrix and a standard role description. These are then discussed by the project manager and BCM, and if necessary the sponsor, at the start of the project. They are then tailored for the specific project, but have proven to be an 80-90% fit at the start.

Does This Work?
We have now started a number of projects this way, and the project manager finds that it gives clarity on the main roles at the start of the project. Also, there is little chance that the BCM will try and run the project, normally they have their hands full with the business change anyway! So the BCM is happy to know that there is someone else responsible for the day-to-day running of the project. A number of projects that started with this structure have completed, and the feedback from the customers has been good. On review the project managers feel that this approach works well, and also gives enough room for tailoring to the needs of the individual project.
In Summary
This problem only occurs in projects that are not part of a programme, but in my team we have a large number of these. Having a project manager and a BCM, with clear responsibilities and the capabilities to match, greatly increases the chance of success in the project team. I am aware that this is probably not the only way to solve this dilemma, and would like to hear from people who have other ideas and experiences, even if they are contradictory to mine!

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If you are looking to cloud computing to simplify your IT environment, I’m afraid I have bad news for you.

Yeah, you might find yourself having to worry less about infrastructure, less about how storage systems work or what networking to use to connect a virtualized resource pool, or even what middleware settings are optimal for your applications. However, for every problem eliminated by choosing cloud, you’ll find it just creates more of the problems you remain accountable for—and may even create some new problems that you never had to face before.

Which is as it should be. Let me explain.

When I describe cloud computing as an application-centric operations model, one of the first questions that should come to mind is “operations of what, exactly?” Just because the cloud is focused on the application, it by no means implies that the application is all that is being operated. In fact, just as in any computing technology since the earliest electronic computers, the application can’t exist without myriad things supporting it.

And the world doesn’t consist of a single applications, but, in fact, millions of applications. Most of these are interconnected in some way, and the matrix of code, data, infrastructure, people, policies, requirements and so on that makes up modern IT is ultimately a very interconnected, complex system. Cloud computing is just one (very effective) way of dealing with that complexity.

Cloud as a complex system

What’s interesting is that it turns out science has a whole body of work around complex systems. A complex system, according to Wikipedia, is “a system composed of interconnected parts that as a whole exhibit one or more properties (behavior among the possible properties) not obvious from the properties of the individual parts.”

That’s certainly true of the modern interconnected IT environment. Just look at automated trading systems and the famous “flash crash” for an example—systems designed for increasing market returns reacted to each other in a way that temporarily crashed that very market. Other examples abound, and I’m sure your own IT environment often behaves in ways that no single application or other element was designed to do explicitly.

What science teaches us about complex systems is that they are made up of many individual agents, each of which effect and are affected by agents around them. The feedback loops of events created by agents affecting each other both directly and indirectly, combined with the mechanisms that choose behaviors to in response to those events, combine to create the systemic behavior that is so unpredictable.

Cloud as an adaptive system

The thing is, however, a certain class of complex systems, complex adaptive systems, have the additional trait that they can change their behavior in response to the success or failure of previous behaviors when a given event occurs—or when a certain series of events occurs. This ability to “learn” and adapt to the surrounding system environment creates amazing outcomes, including many of the most rich, enduring and powerful systems in our universe.

Think biology. Think economics. Think ecosystems.

IT is adaptive, in that winning functionality survives and thrives, while losing functionality dies out and disappears. Thus, those investing in building IT technologies are constantly seeking ways for their technology to survive in a changing, often hostile environment.

If an application, or function or even just a line of code fails to add value to the environment—or worse, negatively disrupts the value of the environment—it will be removed or changed, one way or another. Those that rely on IT are constantly seeking ways to optimize applications, data and technologies to take the most advantage of their systems environments.

The result is constant innovation, and constant adjustment to our needs as businesses and individuals. It ain’t always pretty, as they say, but so far it has been quite effective. (I should note that this even applies to infrequently modified “legacy” applications; there is an ongoing decision to not modify such an application, and thus it continues to survive.)

The developer as DNA

I want to leave you with one last thought, however. One of the things about complex adaptive systems is the learning or adapting traits of the agents in the system. In the world of evolution, the main agent of learning or change is DNA. In the world of IT, the agent of learning or change is the engineer or software developer.

If something goes wrong with an application, developers are on the hook to fix it, change it or kill it. If existing hardware fails to create new opportunities to innovate, engineers find new approaches to introduce into the ecosystem to shake things up.

However, developers and engineers can only make those changes one, or a few, components at a time. Nobody can configure the “system” to work an expected way. All you can do is constantly monitor the success and effectiveness of the technologies you deploy into the cloud, and constantly tweak them to make them as useful as they can be in that environment.

It’s up to people to make technologies that survive cloud as a complex system—one component at a time. That’s, well, how you deal with it.

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Sainsbury’s: Brand Match initiative has been a big hit says supermarket chain

The supermarket chain grew sales, excluding fuel, by 2.1% on a like-for-like basis for the quarter ending 7 January.

Sainsbury’s increased market share by driving up transactions by 1.5 million to 26 million in the period, pushing up total sales for its third financial quarter by 4.5%, excluding fuel.

Justin King, chief executive at Sainsbury’s, said: “This was a strong quarter, rounded off by our best Christmas ever, despite the economic backdrop.

“Across the quarter, customers chose Sainsbury’s to help them ‘live well for less’, taking advantage of our great value offer during October and November, and then treating themselves and their families over the holiday season.”

Sainsbury’s replaced its “try something new today” positioning with the new “live well for less” strategy in September, in an effort to reflect the increasing economic pressures on customers.

The following month it rolled out its Brand Match initiative across the UK, which ensures customers can buy branded goods at the prices offered by Asda and Tesco if they cost less at these rivals.

Sainsbury’s says Brand Match has proved a “big hit” and has consequently extended the initiative into 2012.

Total sales for the period were driven by Sainsbury’s aggressive expansion plans, which included opening its 1,000th store, as well as 21 new convenience stores.

A 20% increase in online sales also contributed to the supermarket chain’s record-breaking Christmas, with almost 75% of online merchandise orders at Christmas being “click and collect”.

During the latest quarter, Sainsbury’s grew its Taste the Difference range by 10%, while also seeing growth in its Basics range as a result of the growing popularity in home baking.

The supermarket also claims sales of its TU clothing range have grown market share after the launch of the Christmas partywear range of celebrity Gok Wan, which was rolled out on 17 November.

Sainsbury’s success is in stark contrast to the forecast for Tesco by the latter’s house broker Deutsche Bank of a 2% drop in sales for the six weeks to 7 January.

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As the project environment grows in complexity, project management will require team, stakeholder and executive collaboration in 2012 like never before. On-the-job application of training, custom-made project approaches, innovative project tools and smarter resource management will be essential for driving the greatest business impact.

Not only project management, but also the definition of “project success” has changed to encompass more than the triple constraint of time, cost and scope. Collaboration is a common theme throughout many of the 2012 top 10 trends for project management, which were determined by a global panel of ESI International senior executives and subject matter experts.

1. Programme management will gain momentum, but resources remain in short supply

Increasingly, large initiatives undertaken by corporations and government agencies are being recognised for what they are and aren’t – namely programmes, not projects, which require a highly advanced set of skills supported by appropriate tools and methods to successfully execute. Yet many organisations struggle to find the right people and lack the management practices necessary to ensure success. In 2012 we will see more investments made in competency models, training, methodology development, tool use, and career paths to ensure that professionals who carry the title “programme manager” are fit for the role.

2. Collaboration software solutions will become  an essential business tool for project teams

The proliferation of collaborative software, such as SharePoint, in the project environment is going to intensify in 2012. Fueled by increasingly complex and virtual projects as well as tightened budgets, today’s environment demands a more efficient way to manage communication and workflow.

Collaboration is central to project management and having a site which allows project artifacts to be created, shared, and distributed within a repository that provides web-based access and critical functions such as automatic distribution and notification, version control, and user authentication, greatly enhances productivity.

3. Learning transfer will become the new mantra, but with little structured application

Learning transfer – the ability to apply training back on the job – will continue to be on the minds of project management office (PMO) chiefs and learning and development (L&D) professionals who want their project managers to return from training ready to apply what they learned immediately and accurately to their projects. While L&D and business heads agree that sustained learning is a sound idea, very few organisations will invest in a formal process to make it happen. In 2012 we will see many organisations discussing the importance of learning transfer without really putting in place a structured approach to ensure it happens.

4. Agile blends with waterfall for a new “hybrid” approach

Having moved from “manifesto to mainstream,” agile development has confronted project teams with the difficulty of implementing the experimental and hyper-collaborative approach. To transition an organisation into fully adopting certain aspects of agile, project teams are combining traditional and agile elements to create their own hybrid approach. In areas such as planning, requirements, and team communication, organisations are designing custom-made methodologies to do what works for them.

5. Smarter project investments will require a stronger marriage between project management and business process management (BPM)

In the financial services industry, and specifically in the insurance sector, there will be a continued laser-like focus on performing business processes as efficiently as possible to drive down operating costs. The philosophy of BPM is fast becoming a key factor in project selection. When new projects are proposed, their value will be judged to a large extent on the impact they will have on the organisation’s business processes. The more impact the project has on reducing internal costs, the higher it will be ranked. The “smart” money will be spent on driving costs out of the business. Given the high premium being placed on efficient processes delivered through projects, BPM is a key concept with which project managers will need to be intimately familiar.

6. Internal certifications in corporations and public sector will eclipse the PMP

With roughly 470,000 Project Management Professional (PMP) credentials having  been awarded worldwide thus far, the PMP remains the most popular and ubiquitous credential on the planet. However, it is not the prominent credential everywhere. In the US government as well as Fortune 500 corporations, a hierarchy of “internal” credentials has overshadowed the PMP in terms of prominence. To be sure, the PMP remains important, but it is now just one rung on the career ladder to get to the top.

7.  More PMO heads will measure effectiveness on business results

While introducing tools, using methodologies, mapping project management practices, sending project managers to training, and increasing the number of PMPs in the organisation are important metrics for a PMO head to collect and report on, they do not speak to the effectiveness of the PMO from a business perspective. To judge business effectiveness, PMO heads need to determine if their work has had a positive, quantifiable effect on the business in terms of troubled project reduction, lower project manager attrition, and faster time to market. In 2012 the practice of measuring the outputs, not the inputs, of project management will gain traction.

8. Good project managers will buck unemployment trends

Even though unemployment is at record levels in many countries, good project managers are hard to find. Recruiting continues even in tough economies and organisations need individuals who can perform the basics flawlessly. The hunger for project management basics, in particular risk management, will continue to surge in 2012, especially in such countries as India and China where project manager attrition rates are disturbingly high and continuous training of new staff is critical.

9. Client-centric project management will outpace the “triple constraint”

For years, time, cost and scope were the metrics upon which the success of all projects and their managers were judged. While the triple constraints remain important, they are no longer the be-all-and-end-all for project success. While risk and quality have also been cited as additional “constraints,” the clear trend in 2012 is the value the project delivers to the organisation. The new definition of project success is that a project can exceed its time and cost estimates so long as the client determines that it is successful by whatever criteria they use. In today’s environment, project value is determined by the “recipient” – or client – not the “provider.”

10. HR professionals will seek assessments to identify high-potential project managers

Because project management is such an important function, human resources (HR) professionals will be tasked more intensely with identifying high-potential project managers in 2012. The challenge HR professionals will face is that there is no silver bullet assessment for identifying great project managers. Existing knowledge and skills assessments are of little use since they are not designed for entry-level project manager positions. Nonetheless, candidates must be measured not only on their technical abilities, but also on the all-important business and interpersonal skills. To the best of our knowledge, no one has yet developed such an assessment, but HR professionals will continue, and intensify, their assessment search this year.

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