Recently, numerous the world's top project management organisations took major initiatives to show executive management regarding the strategic importance and advantages of project management. The emphasis is always to move from specific project management to organisational project management, which these organizations maintain is a strategic advantage in a competitive economy.
In this essay, Ed Naughton, Director General of the Institute of Project Management and recent 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 a vehicle for competitive advantage.
Ed: What do you point ideal Project Management is?
Prof. Green: Strategic project management may be the management of the projects that are of crucial importance to enable the company in general to get competitive advantage.
Ed: And what becomes a competitive advantage, then?
Prof. Green: There are three features of having a core competence. Discover more about site by going to our disturbing wiki. The three qualities are: it adds value to customers; it's perhaps not simply imitated; it opens up new possibilities later on.
Ed: But how can project management deliver a competitive advantage?
Prof. Green: You will find two aspects to project management. One aspect is the actual choice of the kind of projects that the enterprise partcipates in, and secondly there's implementation, how a projects themselves are handled.
Ed: Competitive advantage - the significance of selecting the projects - it is difficult to determine which projects should be selected!
Prof. Green: I do believe that the selection and prioritisation of tasks is something that has not been done well within-the project management literature because it's basically been thought away through reducing it to financial analysis. The strategic imperative gives you a different way of prioritising projects since it is saying that some projects may not be as profitable as others, but if they add to our skill relative to others, then that is going to be important.
Therefore, to take an example, if a company's competitive advantage is introducing new services more quickly than others, pharmaceuticals, let's say, getting product to market more quickly, then a projects that enable it to acquire the product more quickly to market are going to function as the most critical types, even if within their own terms, they don't have higher profitability than various projects.
Ed: But if we are going to select our projects, we have to determine what're the boundaries or measurements we're going to select them against that provide us the competitive edge.
Prof. Green: Definitely. The business must know which actions it's involved in, which are the critical ones for it competitive advantage and then, that drives the choice of projects. To learn more, you should take a gaze at: advertiser. Companies are not excellent at doing that and they might not even understand what these activities are. They'll believe that it is every thing they do due to the energy system.
Ed: If a company formulates its strategy, then what the project management community says is that project management could be the channel for delivering that strategy. Therefore, if the company is great at doing project management, does it have any strategic advantage?
Prof. Green: Well, I guess that returns to this issue of the difference between the form of projects that are selected and the way you manage the projects. Clearly choosing the sort of projects depends upon being able to link and prioritise projects according to a knowledge of what the capability of a business is relative to others.
Ed: Let us suppose that the strategy is set. So that you can provide the strategy, it has to be broken-down, decomposed into a number of tasks. Consequently, you must be good at doing project management to deliver the strategy. Now, the literature says that for a business to be proficient at doing projects it has to: place in 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 integrated way utilizing the idea of a project office. Does taking those three methods offer a competitive advantage because of this business?
Prof. Green: Where project management, or how you handle tasks, becomes a source of competitive advantage is when you can do things better than the others. The 'better than' is through the ability and reasoning and the knowledge which can be built-up as time passes of managing projects. There is an event curve effect here. Two companies will soon be at different points in the experience curve regarding the information they've accumulated to control these bits of jobs where the rule book is inadequate. You'll need management sense and knowledge since however good the rule book is, it'll never deal entirely using the complexity of life. You've to manage down the ability curve, you have to manage the knowledge and learning that you have of the three facets of project management for this to become strategic.
Ed: Well, then, I do believe there's a niche 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 aligned that competency to the selection of projects which will help us to provide this competitive advantage. Is project management capable of being copied?
Prof. Asea Redox includes more about how to mull over it. Green: Not the softer aspects and not the develop-ment of tacit understanding of having run many, many jobs with time. So, for instance, you, Ed, have significantly more familiarity with how-to work jobs than other people. That's why people came to you, since while you both might have a standard book like the PMBoK or even the ICB, you have produced more experiential knowledge around it.
In essence, it could be imitated a certain amount of the way, but not when you arrange the softer tacit knowledge of experience into it.
Ed: Organisational project management maturity styles are a hot topic at this time and are closely for this 'experience curve' effect you mentioned earlier - how should we see them?
Prof. Green: in my opinion in moving beyond painting by numbers, moving beyond the simplistic idea that that is all you should do and you may enforce this set of capabilities and techniques and text book methods and a company is completely plastic. In ways, just the same difficulty was experienced by the designers of the ability curve. If you have an opinion about scandal, you will possibly require to compare about asea health products. If you show companies the ability curve on cost, it's almost as though, for every single doubling of size, cost savings occur without you being forced to do any such thing. What we realize is nevertheless, that the experience curve is a potential of the risk. Its' realisation depends upon the ability of managers.
Ed: Are senior executives/chief executives in the attitude to appreciate the potential advantages of project management?
Prof. Green: Until lately, project management has promoted it-self in technical terms. If it was offered in terms of the integration at common management, at the capability to manage throughout the characteristics financing approach procedures with judgement, then it would be much more attractive to senior managers. So, it's about the blending of the smooth and the difficult, the strategies using the reasoning and the knowledge that makes project management so strong. If senior executives don't accept it at this time, it's maybe not since they're wrong. It's because project management hasn't sold it-self as effectively as it should've done.
Ed: Do we must offer to chief executives and senior executives that it'll produce competitive advantage for them?
Prof. Green: No, I think we need to show them how it does it. We must get in there and actually show them how they are able to put it to use, not only with regards to delivering tasks on time and within cost. We must show them how they can use it to overcome resistance to change, how they can use it to enhance capabilities and activities that cause competitive edge, how they can use it to enhance the tacit knowledge in the company. There is a complete range of ways that they can put it to use. They need to see that the proof-of the results surpasses just how they are currently doing it..
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