Recently, a number of the world's top project management organisations have taken major initiatives to show government management regarding the strategic importance and benefits of project management. The emphasis is to move from specific project management to organisational project management, which these companies preserve is a strategic advantage in a competitive economy.
In this essay, Ed Naughton, Director-general of the Institute of Project Management and current IPMA Vice-president, asks Professor Sebastian Green, Dean of the Faculty of Commerce and Professor of Management and Marketing at University College Cork (previously of the London Business School), about his views of strategic project management as an automobile for competitive advantage.
Ed: What do you issue ideal Project Management is?
Prof. Green: Strategic project management is the management of the jobs that are of crucial importance to allow the business as a whole to have competitive advantage.
Ed: And what defines a competitive advantage, then?
Prof. Green: You will find three features of getting a core competence. The three qualities are: it adds value to customers; it is perhaps not easily imitated; it opens up new opportunities in the future.
Ed: But how can challenge management deliver a competitive advantage?
Prof. Green: You will find two factors to project management. One element is the actual selection of the type of projects that the company partcipates in, and secondly there's execution, how a projects themselves are maintained.
Ed: Competitive advantage - the importance of selecting the projects - it is not easy to determine which projects ought to be selected!
Prof. Green: I do believe that the selection and prioritisation of projects is something that has not been done well within the project management literature because it is essentially been assumed away through reducing it to financial analysis. The strategic imperative gives you an alternative way of prioritising projects as it is saying that some projects may not be as profitable as others, but when they add to our expertise relative to others, then that is going to be important.
So, to just take an illustration, if a company's competitive advantage is introducing services more quickly than the others, pharmaceuticals, let us say, getting product to market more quickly, then your projects that allow it to get the product more quickly to market are going to function as the most critical ones, even if in their own terms, they do not have higher productivity than various projects.
Ed: But if we're going to select our jobs, we've to determine what're the parameters or measurements we are going to select them against that give us the competitive advantage.
Prof. Green: Completely. The enterprise has to know which activities it is involved in, which are the important ones for it then and competitive advantage, that drives the choice of projects. Organisations aren't great at doing that and they may not even know what these actions are. They will think it is anything they do due to the power system.
Ed: If its strategy is formulated by a company, then what the project management group says is that project management may be the medium for providing that strategy. Then, when the business is great at doing project management, is there any strategic advantage?
Prof. Green: Well, perhaps that returns to this problem of the difference between the kind of projects that are plumped for and the way you manage the projects. Obviously selecting the type of projects depends on having the ability to link and prioritise projects according to a knowledge of what the ability of an operation is in accordance with others.
Ed: Let's suppose that the method is about. So that you can deliver the strategy, it has to be broken-down, decomposed into a series of jobs. Therefore, you should be great at doing project management to deliver the strategy. Today, the literature says that for a company to become proficient at doing jobs it has to: devote project management procedures, train people on how to apply/do project management and co-ordinate the efforts of the people qualified to work to procedures in and integral way utilizing the idea of a project office. Does taking these three measures offer a competitive advantage for this organisation?
Prof. Green: Where project management, or how you manage tasks, becomes a source of competitive advantage is when you may do things a lot better than the others. The 'better-than' is through the ability and judgement and the data which will be built up as time passes of managing projects. There's an event curve effect here. Two enterprises will soon be at various points in the experience curve regarding the knowledge they have built up to manage those components of projects where the rule book is inadequate. You need knowledge and management judgement since however good the rule book is, it'll never deal fully with all the complexity of life. You've to manage down the experience curve, you've to manage the understanding and learning that you have of these three areas of project management for it to become strategic.
Ed: Well, then, I do believe there is a gap there that has to be addressed as well, in that we've now created a competency at doing project management to do projects, but we have not aimed that competency to the choice of projects which will help us to provide this competitive advantage. Dig up more on view site by visiting our wonderful wiki. Is project management with the capacity of being copied?
Prof. Green: Not the softer elements and not the development of tacit knowledge of having run many, many projects with time. Therefore, as an example, you, Ed, have more understanding of just how to work tasks than others. That's why people came to you, since while you both might have a regular book such as the PMBoK or the ICB, you have developed more experiential knowledge around it.
In essence, it can be copied a specific amount of just how, although not when you align the softer tacit understanding of knowledge into it.
Ed: Organisational project management maturity styles are a hot topic at the moment and are directly linked to the 'experience curve' effect you mentioned ear-lier - how should we see them?
Prof. Green: in my opinion in moving beyond painting by quantities, moving beyond the idea that a company is totally plastic and you may enforce this set of skills and procedures and text book protocols and that is all you have to do. In a way, exactly the same problem was experienced by the developers of the knowledge curve. If you show companies the experience curve on cost, it is very nearly as though, for each doubling of volume, cost reductions occur without you having to do something. We discovered purchase here by searching books in the library. What we all know is however, the experience curve is a potential of the risk. Its' realisation depends on the skill of managers.
Ed: Are senior executives/chief executives in the mindset to understand the potential benefits of project management?
Prof. Green: Until recently, project management has promoted it-self in technical terms. Purchase Here is a thought-provoking resource for further concerning how to flirt with this concept. Then it would become more attractive to senior managers, if it was promoted in terms of the integration at common management, at the capability to manage throughout the functions financing technique processes with judgement. So, it is about the mixing of the smooth and the hard, the techniques using the thinking and the ability that produces project management so strong. If senior managers do not accept it right now, it is maybe not since they're wrong. It is because project management has not promoted it-self as efficiently as it should've done.
Ed: Do we must offer to senior executives and chief executives that it will offer competitive advantage to them?
Prof. Green: No, I think we have to show them how it does it. We need to get inside and really show them how they are able to put it to use, not merely in terms of delivering projects on time and within cost. We have to show them how they can use it to overcome resistance to change, how they can use it to enhance capabilities and actions that cause competitive edge, how they can use it to enhance the tacit knowledge in the organisation. There is a whole range of ways in which they can use it. To read more, please consider looking at: click. They have to see that the proof-of the outcome surpasses the way they are currently doing it..
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