What a year for the project management world during 2014. One might think that the industry would be taking it easy in 2015, but that’s not going to be the case. There will be more positive developments in 2015, and that’s fantastic news for project managers.

Here are some of the top trends that project managers should be watching out for next year.

Data Visualizations

We are in the era of big data, and while that might not touch our work directly, the broader impact of the public’s increasing appetite to make sense of large sums of data and our new love for data visualizations has definitely been felt. One popular example is Nate Silver’s 538 blog.

In our industry, visual dashboards are becoming the industry standard for any type of data presentations and project reporting. At ProjectManager.com, we developed our project dashboards to present summary and detailed information about projects, programs and portfolios. This type of data viz is not just about flashy displays. Data visualizations like this are dual-purpose: they communicate effectively to project stakeholders while giving project managers and team members real-time views to investigate issues if they spot anything awry.

Virtual/Global Teams

Globally, we are witnessing more companies developing large-scale projects with distributed teams across countries. A recent McKinsey study of global software development teams found that process and networking tools improved team productivity 20-30%. Indeed, many of our clients are using our tool to support their growing remote teams.

In fact, ProjectManager.com just became a multinational corporation, with our new office in Austin, Texas and our office in Auckland, New Zealand!

Biometrics

If you haven’t been asked to include biometric information in your projects, you might soon. There will be greater acceptance of using biometric information such as fingerprints to log into your favorite online tools, though the debate is still out as to the level of security biometrics actually adds. (When Apple paved the way with fingerprint scanning on their new iPhone 6, they still offered the double-layer of protection of security code entry.)

That said, India’s launch of an epic biometrics identification program for some 380 million of its citizens means the technology is certainly being implemented large-scale. For project managers, this could mean adding in a layer of security for online project management software projects with a distributed team or usage of fingerprint scanning via mobile apps.

More project managers!

That’s good news, isn’t it? There will be more project work for everyone. According to PMI’s research, 15.7 million project jobs will be created in 11 countries by 2020. Many of those positions will be filled by people who don’t have years of formal training in project management. They will want easy-to-use, professional-grade project management software that doesn’t take ages to learn and that is compatible with everything that they are used to using already.

Make your own change for next year and use ProjectManager.com to manage your 2015 projects and beyond…