Future Trends in SEPM

As a team, choose ONE of the trends from the reading list in units 11 and 12. Then prepare a five-minute presentation that argues why the trend you chose is the MOST influential one and will have the most influence on the field of software engineering project management in the next ten years. You will need to support the provided research with additional texts that you locate, including the articles from units 11 and 12.

According to (Van der Aalst et al., 2018), Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a generic term that refers to a group of tools that can replace humans performing repetitive tasks.

From our research in module 1 of this course, we learned that RPA requires data that is well structured to produce benefits on its application. In contrast, Intelligent Process Automation (IPA) can perform on semi-structured and unstructured data.

In general, time is valuable in an organisation, and employees spend a lot of this time performing receptive tasks. This is where RPA becomes essential, to free up the time that employees can use to work on activities that require more thinking. This is also applicable to employees involved in Project management (PM) tasks.

Recurring PM tasks within planning and collaborating on client deliverables, analysing metrics, and monitoring the project's progress can be enhanced by implementing RPA.

As a straight transition from no automation at all to IPA has the risk of not being accepted by the employees, RPA can be taken as an intermediate step towards the implementation of IPA.

Although it presents a lot of advantages, it will also bring some challenges. According to (El Khatib et al., 2023), challenges in its acceptance, deployment and provision of its solutions. Despite this, and considering PM as one of the business processes in an organisation, the benefits overtake the challenges and can represent cost reduction, increment in accuracy and efficiency. These positive effects make RPA a trend that will continue influencing the Software Engineering Project management.

References

El Khatib, M., Almarri, A., Almemari, A. and Alqassimi, A. (2023) How Does Robotics Process Automation (RPA) Affect Project Management Practices. Advances in Internet of Things, 13, 13-30. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4236/ait.2023.132002

Van der Aalst, W., Bichler, M. & Heinzl, A. (2018) Robotic Process Automation. Available from: https://link-springer-com.uniessexlib.idm.oclc.org/article/10.1007/s12599-018-0542-4 [Accessed 10 December 2023]