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Lately, a number of the world's major project management organisations have taken major initiatives to enlighten executive management about the strategic importance and benefits of project management. The concentrate is to move from individual project management to organisational project management, which these organisations preserve is a strategic benefit in a competitive economy.
In this report, Ed Naughton, Director General of the Institute of Project Management and existing IPMA Vice President, asks Professor Sebastian Green, Dean of the Faculty of Commerce and Professor of Management and Advertising at University College Cork (formerly of the London Enterprise School), about his views of strategic project management as a car for competitive benefit.
Ed: What do you thing strategic Project Management is?
Prof. Green: Strategic project management is the management of those projects which are of critical significance to allow the organisation as a whole to have competitive benefit.
Ed: And what defines a competitive benefit, then?
Prof. Green: There are three attributes of possessing a core competence. The three attributes are: it adds value to clients it really is not simply imitated it opens up new possibilities in the future.
Ed: But how can project management yield a competitive benefit?
Prof. Green: There are two elements to project management. A single aspect is the actual selection of the type of projects that the organisation engages in, and secondly there is implementation, how the projects themselves are managed.
Ed: Competitive advantage - the importance of deciding on the right projects - it isn't simple to define which projects need to be chosen!
Prof. Green: I think that the selection and prioritisation of projects is anything that hasn't been accomplished effectively within the project management literature simply because it really is essentially been assumed away through decreasing it to monetary analysis. The strategic imperative offers you a various way of prioritising projects because it's saying that some projects could not be as lucrative as other people, but if they add to our competency relative to other people, then that is going to be critical.
So, to take an instance, if a company's competitive advantage is introducing new goods far more quickly than other people, pharmaceuticals, let's say, receiving item to marketplace a lot more rapidly, then the projects that allow it to get the item much more swiftly to market are going to be the most vital ones, even if in their own terms, they do not have higher profitability than other sorts of projects.
Ed: But if we're going to pick our projects, we have to define what are the parameters or metrics we're going to choose them against that give us the competitive benefit.
Prof. Green: Definitely. The organisation demands to know which activities it is engaged in, which are the essential ones for it competitive benefit and then, that drives the choice of projects. Organisations aren't quite very good at doing that and they may possibly not even know what these activities are. They'll think it's every little thing they do since of the energy system.
Ed: If a company formulates its approach, then what the project management community says is that project management is the medium for delivering that method. So therefore, if the organisation is very good at undertaking project management, does it have any strategic benefit?
Prof. Green: Nicely, I suppose that comes back to this problem of the difference between the type of projects that are selected and the way you manage the projects. Naturally selecting the sort of projects depends on becoming in a position to hyperlink and prioritise projects according to an understanding of what the capability of an organisation is relative to other folks.
Ed: Let us assume that the method is set. In order to deliver the technique, it has to be broken down, decomposed into a series of projects. Consequently, you require to be great at performing project management to provide the method. Now, the literature says that for an organisation to be good at performing projects it has to: put in project management procedures, train folks on how to apply/do project management and co-ordinate the efforts of the individuals educated to function to procedures in and integrated way employing the concept of a project workplace. Does taking these 3 actions provide a competitive advantage for this organisation?
Prof. Green: Exactly where project management, or how you handle projects, becomes a supply of competitive advantage is when you can do items better than others. The 'better than' is via the experience and judgement and the understanding which is built up more than time of managing projects. There is an experience curve impact right here. Two organisations will be at various points in the expertise curve as to the expertise they have constructed up to manage these bits of projects exactly where the rule book is inadequate. You need management judgement and knowledge because however excellent the rule book is, it will never deal fully with the complexity of life. You have to manage down the experience curve, you have to manage the finding out and understanding that you have of those three elements of project management for it to become strategic.
Ed: Properly, then, I believe there is a gap there that has to be addressed as properly, in that we have now created a competency at doing project management to do projects, but we haven't aligned that competency to the selection of projects which will assist us to give this competitive advantage. Is project management capable of being imitated?
Prof. Green: Not the softer elements and not the development of tacit understanding of obtaining run several, many projects over time. So, for example, you, Ed, have far more expertise of how to run projects than other people. That is why individuals came to you, due to the fact although you each may have a standard book such as the PMBoK or the ICB, you have created far more experiential understanding around it.
In essence, it can be imitated a specific amount of the way, but not when you align the softer tacit expertise of encounter into it.
Ed: Organisational project management maturity models are a hot topic at the moment and are closely linked to the 'experience curve' impact you described earlier - how must we view them?
Prof. Green: I think in moving beyond painting by numbers, moving beyond the simplistic thought that an organisation is fully plastic and you can impose this set of procedures and expertise and text book protocols and that is all you want to do. In a way, specifically the same issue was knowledgeable by the developers of the experience curve. If you show companies the expertise curve on expense, it really is nearly as even though, for every doubling of volume, price reductions occur without you having to do anything. What we know is although, that the expertise curve is a possible of a possibility. Its' realisation depends on the ability of managers.
Ed: Are senior executives/chief executives in the mindset to appreciate the prospective positive aspects of project management?
Prof. Green: Until not too long ago, project management has promoted itself in technical terms. If it was promoted in terms of the integration at general management, at the capability to manage across the functions lending technique procedures with judgement, then it would be a lot a lot more eye-catching to senior managers. So, it is about the blending of the challenging and the soft, the techniques with the judgement and the knowledge that tends to make project management so powerful. If senior managers do not embrace it at the moment, it's not since they are wrong. It is since project management hasn't marketed itself as successfully as it should've carried out.
Ed: Do we require to sell to senior executives and chief executives that it will provide competitive advantage to them?
Prof. Green: No, I feel we require to show them how it does it. We require to go in there and in fact show them how they can use it, not just in terms of delivering projects on time and within cost. We need to demonstrate to them how they can use it to overcome organisational resistance to alter, how they can use it to enhance capabilities and activities that lead to competitive benefit, how they can use it to boost the tacit expertise in the organisation. There is a entire variety of techniques in which they can use it. They want to see that the proof of the outcome is better than the way they are presently undertaking it. copeaux de savon de marseille
