Is Project Management The New Management 2.0?

This paper considers the evolving nature of project management (PM) and offers a comparison with the evolving nature of management generally. Specifically, we identify a number of management trends that are drawn from a paper that documents a proposed 'Management 2.0' model, and we compare those trends to the way in which PM is maturing to embrace the challenges of modern organizational progress.Our investigations identify strong and robust parallels between the six forces identified by McDonald (2011), who suggests that the proposed trends are drivers of a future model of management. We also suggest that the direction in which PM has been evolving over the past decade or so is very much in the same manner as McDonald's forces. As a minimum, PM is responding to the same forces, but perhaps in a more coherent manner than traditional management.Some theoretical frameworks are offered that assist in explaining the shift from the historically accepted 'tools and techniques' model to a more nuanced and behaviorally driven paradigm that is arguably more appropriate to manage change in today's flexible and progressive organizations, and which provide a more coherent response, both in PM and traditional management, to McDonald's forces. In addition, we offer a number of examples to robustly support our assertions, based around the development of innovative products from Apple Inc. In using this metaphor to demonstrate the evolution of project-based work, we link PM with innovation and new product development.