Mr Wolfgang Rabl

CEO
next level consulting

Mr Wolfgang Rabl is the founder and owner of next level consulting with more than 25 years of experience in professionalizing project management in large organizations through trainings, executive coaching, standardization, career models and the implementation of PMOs. He teaches project management at the Salzburg business school and Vienna university.

 Managing Complexity and Dynamics

To stay competitive, it was once enough to optimize tasks, re-engineer processes, rationalize cost and execute projects well. In VUCA times with its higher than ever complexity and dynamics this does not suffice anymore. New management approaches are needed. Management approaches that blur the lines between operations and projects. They demand higher personal flexibility at the social, organizational and individual level and need to consider a broad range of factors including, stakeholder, regulatory, and broader community issues.

Just as organizations are faced with increasingly difficult demands, project managers are under greater pressure to facilitate that change, to live up to their organization's heightened expectations to do more with less, at higher quality, with better service, more effectively, in a coordinated and integrated manner, while also trying to be innovative and creative, as well as anticipate future consequences, opportunities, and trends - and always within tight time-frames.

In this session we provide an overview of current approaches to manage complexity and dynamics. We will look into the agile leadership challenges and how they relate to the work of project managers today using examples and case studies from our work at companies like Deutsche Telekom, ZF Friedrichshafen, Lufthansa and Thomas Cook.

• Understanding complexity and dynamics, its drivers and how to manage it using models like VUCA and Cynefin
• The current state of agility in organizations based on the agile maturity model
• Case studies for scaling agility from isolated experimentation to broader organizational use
• An overview of popular agile approaches to manage complexity and dynamics
• Success factors for agile transformation from the perspective of people, culture, processes, and organization
• Agile leadership challenges, best practices and the changing role of middle managers in an organization
• Project managers as change drivers and role models for leadership in complexity and dynamics

** This will be a joint presentation with Mr Thomas Martin, MD,  next level consulting APAC.