A Competitive Advantage

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Recently, several the world's leading project management organizations have taken important initiatives to illuminate executive management about the strategic value and benefits of project management. The focus is to move from individual project management to organisational project management, which these organizations maintain is a strategic advantage in a competitive economy.

In this article, 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 (formerly of the London Business School), about his views of proper project management as an automobile for competitive advantage. Clicking link maybe provides lessons you could tell your sister.

Ed: What does one issue proper Project Management is?

Prof. Green: Strategic project management may be the management of these projects that are of critical importance to help the operation in general to get competitive advantage.

Ed: And what defines a competitive advantage, then?

Prof. Green: There are three characteristics of having a core competence. The three features are: it adds value to customers; it's maybe not easily imitated; it opens up new possibilities in the future.

Ed: But how do challenge management deliver a competitive advantage?

Prof. Green: You will find two elements to project management. One part is the actual collection of the type of projects that the organisation engages in, and secondly there's execution, how the projects themselves are maintained.

Ed: Competitive advantage - the significance of selecting the correct projects - it is difficult to establish which projects ought to be chosen!

Prof. Green: I believe that the selection and prioritisation of tasks is something that's not been done well within-the project management literature because it is generally been assumed away through reducing it to financial analysis. The strategic imperative gives you another way of prioritising projects because it is saying that some projects may not be as successful as others, but when they add to our competency relative to others, then that's going to be important.

So, to simply take an illustration, if a company's competitive advantage is introducing services more quickly than others, pharmaceuticals, let's say, finding product to market more quickly, then your projects that enable it to obtain the product more quickly to market will function as the most critical ones, even if within their own terms, they don't have higher profitability than other sorts of projects.

Ed: But if we're going to select our tasks, we have to define what're the details or measurements we're going to select them against that give the competitive advantage to us.

Prof. We discovered lpaper by searching the Washington Sun-Times. Green: Definitely. The enterprise must know which actions it's engaged in, which are the critical ones for it competitive advantage and then, that drives the choice of projects. Organisations are not great at doing that and they could not even understand what those actions are. They'll believe that it is everything they do because of the energy system.

Ed: If its strategy is formulated by a company, then what the project management group says is that project management is the medium for giving that strategy. Then, when the enterprise is great at doing project management, does it have any strategic advantage?

Prof. Green: Well, perhaps that returns to this issue of the difference between the form of projects that are selected and the way you manage the projects. Obviously choosing the kind of projects depends on having the ability to link and prioritise projects ac-cording to a knowledge of what the potential of a company is relative to others.

Ed: Let's suppose that the technique is set. To be able to deliver the strategy, it has to be divided, decomposed into some projects. Thus, you should be great at doing project management to provide the strategy. Now, the literature says that for an organisation to become great at doing projects it's to: devote project management procedures, train people on how to apply/do project management and co-ordinate the efforts of the people trained to work to procedures in and built-in way utilizing the idea of a project office. Does using these three methods offer a competitive advantage for this business?

Prof. Green: Where project management, or how you handle 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 reasoning and the information which is built-up over time of managing projects. There is an experience curve effect here. As to the knowledge they've built-up where the rule book is limited to control those items of tasks two organisations will be at various points in the experience curve. You-need knowledge and management judgement because however good the rule book is, it'll never deal completely with the complexity of life. You've to manage down the ability curve, you have to manage the learning and knowledge that you have of these three areas of project management because of it to become strategic.

Ed: Well, then, I believe there's a gap there that's to be resolved as well, in that we have now developed a competency at doing project management to do projects, but we have not arranged that competency to the choice of projects which can help us to give this competitive edge. Is project management able to being imitated?

Prof. Green: Not the softer aspects and not the development of tacit knowledge of having run many, many projects with time. Therefore, for example, you, Ed, have significantly more knowledge of just how to work projects than other people. That is why people stumbled on you, because while you both may have a typical book such as the PMBoK or the ICB, you've created more experiential knowledge around it.

In essence, it could be copied a specific amount of the-way, however not when you align the smoother tacit knowledge of experience into it.

Ed: Organisational project management maturity versions are a hot topic right now and are directly from the 'experience curve' effect you mentioned earlier in the day - how should we see them?

Prof. Green: I believe in moving beyond painting by quantities, moving beyond the basic idea that that is all you should do and you may impose this set of skills and techniques and text book protocols and an organisation is wholly plastic. In ways, exactly the same difficulty was experienced by the developers of the ability curve. It's very nearly like, for every doubling of size, cost savings occur without you having to do such a thing, if you show organizations the ability curve o-n cost. What we know is though, that the experience curve is a potential of the possibility. Its' realisation is dependent upon the skill of managers.

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

Prof. Green: Until recently, project management has offered it self in technical terms. Browse here at chrisbrummer.org/ to check up the meaning behind it. If it was promoted in terms-of the integration at normal management, at the ability to manage throughout the features lending strategy methods with thinking, then it would be more appealing to senior managers. So, it's about the blending of the gentle and the hard, the strategies together with the judgement and the knowledge that makes project management so powerful. Browse here at asea discussion to compare the purpose of this idea. If senior executives don't grasp it at this time, it is not since they're wrong. It's because project management hasn't promoted it self as effectively as it should've done.

Ed: Do we have to sell to chief executives and senior executives that it'll deliver competitive advantage for them?

Prof. Green: No, I think we need to show them how it does it. We have to get inside and actually show them how they are able to use it, not only with regards to delivering jobs on time and within cost. We must demonstrate to them how they can use it to overcome resistance to change, how they can use it to enhance capabilities and activities that lead to competitive advantage, how they can use it to enhance the tacit knowledge in the organisation. There is a complete array of ways in which they could use it. They should see that the proof-of the outcome is preferable to just how they're currently doing it..