Purpose Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, project management was undergoing gradual shift and moving from traditional ways of working toward embracing digitization. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated this transformation. This paper highlights the importance of digital project management (DPM), its adoption of digital technologies, the changing role of digital project manager, significant and abrupt swing in the rise of virtual teams and the benefits and challenges of remote project teams. This paper aims to discuss the latest development in project management and to lay out the rationale why DPM is here to stay even after the pandemic. Design/methodology/approach The author has based this research on reviewing publications from the project management journals and publications, interviews of project management professionals and analyzing data from a project management consultancy. Findings The pandemic accelerated the digitalization of project management including the adoption of digital tools and technologies, embracing an agile approach to implementing projects; working collaborative in remote teams; and breaking traditional barriers of geography, time zones and fundamentally how project teams collaborate. Practical implications Project management is being digitized, changing how teams work. Fueled by the pandemic, DPM accelerated its momentum. The rate of adoption is likely to be strong after the pandemic. Organizations and individuals should consider embracing DPM but with the full knowledge of both benefits and challenges. Originality/value DPM is still in its early days even though the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated its use. Today and likely after the pandemic, organizations and people are increasingly embracing digital technologies, remote teams and agile project management approaches to project management. It is likely that in the foreseeable future, nearly all project managers will be digital project managers, giving rise to the importance of understanding the challenges and benefits and building the digital skills for both individuals and organizations.

Purpose While it is common for most C-suite executives to have substantial project responsibilities, many do not have a strong understanding of project management leading to significant failures. As projects are the main mechanisms for implementing changes, project performance has disproportional impact on the competitiveness and viability of organizations. This paper aims to attempt to raise awareness of the Chief Project Officer (CPO) role and lay out important skills and capabilities that are needed for managers to ascend to this role as well as key topics of concern when preparing the mindset to be a successful CPO. Design/methodology/approach The authors have based this research on reviewing publications from the project management journals and publications, interviews of project management professionals and drawing from our industry experience in the field of project management. Findings Most organizations have project managers, either formal or informal, to lead projects. As project environment intensifies across industries, larger organizations rely on a project executives and project management office to oversee projects and performance of C-suite tasks. However, these projects and project management office (PMO) managers often lacks the authority and legitimacy to fully carry out the expected function. This is a clear gap in organizational management, and the gap is growing as more resources are dedicated to projects. Many organizations are equipped with the human resource to develop a CPO, the authors identify five main skills and 20 key topics that are crucial to the success of this vital role. Originality/value While the awareness of the CPO is still in its infancy, most organizations have equivalent or emerging senior project executive roles that may evolve and become CPOs. Today, organizations are increasingly pushed to pursue project-oriented structures to a rapidly changing environment, global market and fast-paced technological advances. It is likely that the CPO role will grow and become a crucial component in top management teams in the coming years to help organizations in moving forward to achieve their strategic goals and objectives.

In 65nm and beyond generations, contact/via patterning is more challenging due to the complexity of manufacturing masks and the weak lithography process window. High NA scanners and suitable illumination can provide the desired resolution and dense pitch. However, there are trade-offs between process window, mask error enhancement factor (MEEF), and proximity effect. Some assistant technology is reported in literature, such as thermal flow, RELACS, SAFIER and sub-resolution assistant features. In this paper, we report a detailed study of the feasibility and limitations of these kinds of methods. Finally, we describe sub-resolution assistant features when used in QUASAR illumination with lower sigma, which have shown great promise to reduce the proximity effect and MEEF to get a larger lithography process window.

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as an engineer, a model based LES system was developed where system inputs were only used as reference material for the rule ba~;e. Each component and its relationship to other components in the target system is modeled and there are no explicit rules as in traditional expert systems. The advantage of this change in approach was that now the system better reflected the basic structure of the domain and the classical problems of rule and context regression are ,minimized. With a model based approach, robust modelinlg of the components is essential to achieve a robust behavior of the system.