Engineering managers are progressively tasked with leveraging digital technologies and innovations which have yet to be fully developed, to seek out opportunities and challenges in complex project contexts. However, there is a disparity between knowledge gained from engineering development programmes, and the rapidly changing landscape of modern project practice, which requires professionals to effectively engage and deploy relevant agile digital skills in practice. For example, complex engineering projects increasingly employ dynamic digital technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Big Data, Augmented and Virtual Reality (AR / VR), 3D Printing, and Digital Twins, which require managers to quickly adapt to changing constraints through agile digital skills. Therefore, this paper seeks to focus on exploring the role of engineering project management programmes in developing knowledge and agile digital skills relevant for future project practice. Through an outline review of project management development programmes, this research paper suggests that their inherent value for engineering project managers, is largely dependent on a combination of applied research, engagement, and agile digital skills development for future practice.

While there have been increasing studies on the impact of financial technology (FinTech), limited research has explored how FinTech supports economic empowerment for informal businesses.Drawing on institutional logics and a case study of mobile money-a FinTech innovation-this study develops a model of mobile money-driven economic empowerment. We argue that this model is important to explain how those at the bottom of the economic pyramid, who are often neglected, use FinTech innovations to create and run informal businesses. Our findings and model explain the dynamics between logics, actors, and mobile money at three levels: regulatory, payments infrastructure, and informal economy. We identify three corresponding effects as outcomes of economic empowerment for informal businesses: greater access to start-up capital, new employment opportunities, and improved financial management. By illustrating these effects, our study contributes to a better understanding of how FinTech innovations offer a possible pathway to economic empowerment for informal businesses.

Large scale projects increasingly operate in complicated settings whilst drawing on an array of complex data-points, which require precise analysis for accurate control and interventions to mitigate possible project failure. Coupled with a growing tendency to rely on new information systems and processes in change projects, 90% of megaprojects globally fail to achieve their planned objectives. Renewed interest in the concept of Artificial Intelligence (AI) against a backdrop of disruptive technological innovations, seeks to enhance project managers' cognitive capacity through the project lifecycle and enhance project excellence. However, despite growing interest there remains limited empirical insights on project managers' ability to leverage AI for cognitive load enhancement in complex settings. As such this research adopts an exploratory sequential linear mixed methods approach to address unresolved empirical issues on transient adaptations of AI in complex projects, and the impact on cognitive load enhancement. Initial thematic findings from semi-structured interviews with domain experts, suggest that in order to leverage AI technologies and processes for sustainable cognitive load enhancement with complex data over time, project managers require improved knowledge and access to relevant technologies that mediate data processes in complex projects, but equally reflect application across different project phases. These initial findings support further hypothesis testing through a larger quantitative study incorporating structural equation modelling to examine the relationship between artificial intelligence and project managers' cognitive load with project data in complex contexts.

No abstract