A Competitive Advantage

SEnuke: Ready for action

Recently, several the world's leading project management organisations have taken major initiatives to enlighten government management concerning the strategic importance and benefits of project management. The emphasis is always to move from individual project management to organisational project management, which these firms maintain is a strategic advantage in a competitive economy.

In this essay, Ed Naughton, Director General of the Institute of Project Management and present 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 car for competitive advantage.

Ed: What does one point proper Project Management is?

Prof. Green: Strategic project management is the management of the projects that are of crucial importance to enable the enterprise as a whole to get competitive advantage. Visit relevant webpage to research the inner workings of this activity.

Ed: And what becomes a competitive advantage, then?

Prof. Green: You can find three attributes of experiencing a core competence. The three features are: it adds value to customers; it's maybe not simply imitated; it opens up new possibilities later on.

Ed: But how do task management generate a competitive advantage?

Prof. Green: You will find two aspects to project management. One aspect is the actual choice of the type of projects that the company engages in, and subsequently there's implementation, the way the projects themselves are handled.

Ed: Competitive advantage - the significance of choosing the projects - it's difficult to establish which projects should be chosen!

Prof. Green: I believe that the selection and prioritisation of tasks is something that has not been done well within the project management literature because it's generally 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 if they add to our expertise relative to others, then that is going to be important.

Therefore, to simply take an illustration, if a company's competitive advantage is introducing new products more quickly than others, pharmaceuticals, let us say, getting product to market more quickly, then a projects that enable it to acquire the product more quickly to market are likely to function as the most significant ones, even if within their own terms, they do not have higher success than various projects.

Ed: But if we are going to select our projects, we've to define what're the variables or measurements we are going to select them against that give us the competitive edge.

Prof. Green: Definitely. The company has to know which activities it is employed in, which are the important ones for it then and competitive advantage, that drives the choice of projects. Organizations are not great at doing that and they could not even understand what these activities are. They will think it is every thing they do because of the power system.

Ed: If its strategy is formulated by a company, then what the project management community says is that project management could be the channel for giving that strategy. Then, if the company is good at doing project management, is there any strategic advantage?

Prof. Green: Well, perhaps that comes home to this problem of the difference between the sort of projects that are opted for and the way you manage the projects. Certainly selecting the sort of projects depends on being able to link and prioritise projects ac-cording to an understanding of what the capacity of a business is relative to others.

Ed: Let's assume the technique is set. So that you can produce the strategy, it's to be divided, decomposed into some tasks. Consequently, you should be great at doing project management to supply the strategy. Today, the literature says that for an organisation to become proficient at doing projects it's to: place in project management procedures, train people on how best to apply/do project management and co-ordinate the efforts of the people qualified to work to procedures in and built-in way using the concept of a project office. Does using those three measures produce a competitive advantage for this business?

Prof. Green: Where project management, or how you handle jobs, becomes a source of competitive advantage is when you may do things better than others. The 'better than' is through the experience and thinking and the information which can be accumulated with time of managing projects. There's an experience curve effect here. Regarding the information they have built-up to handle these bits of tasks where the rule book is inadequate two enterprises will soon be at various points in the experience curve. You need knowledge and management sense because however good the rule book is, it'll never deal entirely with the complexity of life. You've to manage down the ability curve, you've to manage the learning and understanding that you've of these three aspects of project management for this to become ideal. If you think you know any thing, you will perhaps require to explore about tour https://www.law.ox.ac.uk/people/chris-brummer/.

Ed: Well, then, I think there's a gap there that has to be addressed as well, in that we've now produced a competency at doing project management to do projects, but we have not aimed that competency to the choice of projects which can help us to provide this competitive advantage. Is project management with the capacity of being copied?

Prof. Green: Not the softer features and not the devel-opment of tacit understanding of having run many, many jobs over time. Therefore, like, you, Ed, have significantly more knowledge of just how to work jobs than others. That's why people came to you, since while you both might have a standard book such as the PMBoK or even the ICB, you have produced more experiential knowledge around it.

Basically, it could be copied a quantity of the way, but not when you arrange the smoother tacit understanding of knowledge into it.

Ed: Organisational project management maturity models are a hot topic at the moment and are directly linked to the 'experience curve' effect you mentioned earlier - how should we see them?

Prof. Green: I believe in moving beyond painting by quantities, moving beyond the idea that that's all you have to do and you can encourage this set of skills and procedures and text book practices and an operation is wholly plastic. In a way, exactly the same difficulty was experienced by the builders of the knowledge curve. It's very nearly as though, for each and every doubling of size, cost savings occur without you having to do any such thing, if you show the experience curve to organizations o-n cost. What we realize is however, the experience curve is a potential of the chance. This thought-provoking www.law.ox.ac.uk/people/chris-brummer URL has specific compelling lessons for where to recognize it. Its' realisation depends on the ability of professionals.

Ed: Are senior executives/chief executives in-the mindset to appreciate the possible benefits of project management?

Prof. Green: Until recently, project management has promoted it-self in technical terms. If it was promoted in terms-of the integration at standard management, at the ability to manage across the features lending method techniques with sense, then it would be much more attractive to senior managers. So, it's about the blending of the smooth and the hard, the practices with the thinking and the experience which makes project management so effective. If senior executives don't accept it right now, it's perhaps not as they are wrong. It's because project management hasn't sold it self as effortlessly as it should've done.

Ed: Do we must sell to chief executives and senior executives that it will deliver competitive advantage for them?

Prof. To get alternative interpretations, please consider peeping at: visit our site. Green: No, I do believe we must demonstrate to them how it does it. We need to go in there and really show them how they can use it, not only in terms of offering projects on time and within cost. We need to demonstrate to them how they can use it to overcome resistance to change, how they can use it to enhance capabilities and activities that cause competitive advantage, how they can use it to enhance the tacit knowledge in the company. There is a complete range of ways that they can use it. They need to note that the evidence of the end result surpasses the way they are currently doing it..