It's no longer enough for to possess good people skills and to be fluent in project management best practices, tools and methodologies. To succeed--and get hired--today, ; they need to be flexible and focused on business value; and they increasingly need to be familiar with Agile software development methodologies, writes Forrester Analyst Mary Gerush in . A former IT project manager herself, Gerush and colleagues interviewed IT professionals and project management experts from a variety of organizations, including Chevron, Microsoft and LiquidPlanner, for the report.

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Gerush notes that shifting business conditions are changing the role of the project manager and the skills associated with it. "Organizations are striving to achieve faster [software] delivery without diminishing quality or increasing cost," she writes. As a result, she observes, they're moving from traditional software development methodologies to more Agile ones.

The move to Agile software development "shifts the role of the project manager from a director to a facilitator," writes Gerush, because Agile development methodologies rely on self-managed, cross-functional teams. In an Agile software delivery environment, the traditional command-and-control approach of project managers is counter-productive, Gerush notes. Instead of defining roles and making sure team members are following project management processes and procedures to a T, next generation project managers need to focus on improving collaboration and removing obstacles and distractions so that project team members can get their work done on time and on budget.

[ For more on Agile, see and . ]