For several hours each day over a period of more than six months, Dunn worked intensively with users from five different departments to hash out exactly how the system would work. "I'd sit with them and get approval on the workflow, the drop-down menus, the names of fields -- everything," she says. Part of Dunn's job was to corral all of the users' opinions and needs into a single, unified system and help them visualize what it would look like.

Once the requirements and screen prototypes were solidified, Dunn sent them to 12 offshore programmers in India whom she had previously met to tutor in the ways of the U.S. real estate business. Then she coordinated communication between the users and programmers, remaining mindful of the cultural and time-zone differences.

Cross-cultural teaming and heavy business immersion are just some of the new challenges that project managers like Dunn now face. Increasingly, project teams and key decision-makers are dispersed throughout the world, time frames for completion are compressed because of heightened competition, and the projects themselves are not well defined yet are tied ever more tightly to business success.

This means big changes for project managers. "The perspective, the knowledge base, the skill set and the methods traditionally employed by the project manager must change to accommodate the demands of project management in 2006," says Bryan Beverly, a software architect and team leader at BAE Systems Information Technology, a government IT contractor in McLean, Va.

Broaden your view