Critical analysis of the COVID-19 pandemic and war situations: the Project Management perspective

The recent years, especially the period that goes from the beginning of 2020 to now (end of 2022), have been characterized by several disruptions that introduced additional uncertainty, complexity, and volatility into the world. This thesis focuses on how the outbreak of COVID-19 and the ongoing war in Ukraine are influencing and changing project management practices worldwide. Various impacts are analyzed, including decreased productivity, challenging communication among the stakeholders due to remote work policies, and supply chain disruptions. In addition, the changes introduced to mitigate the effects of these impacts are also evaluated, namely implementing effective communications and stakeholder management, using online collaboration tools, and reshaping supply chains to make them resilient. To assess the consequences of such disruptions towards project success and performance, projects from three different sectors, and different countries, are examined: the construction industry, software development, and healthcare projects as a response to COVID-19. The reason behind the choice of these three different sectors stems from the different challenges faced and approaches used by the project teams, as will be discussed. The conclusion is that strategic implementation of Agile methodologies or of a Hybrid approach (a combination of Agile and Waterfall), contrary to predictive project management, allows companies to pivot and adapt quickly to the new market in a productive and cost-effective way.