Management A Competitive Advantage

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Recently, numerous the world's major project management companies took major initiatives to illuminate executive management regarding the strategic value and benefits of project management. The emphasis is to move from individual project management to organisational project management, which these companies preserve is a strategic advantage in a competitive economy.

In this article, Ed Naughton, Director General of the Institute of Project Management and current IPMA Vice-president, requires 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 point ideal Project Management is?

Prof. Green: Strategic project management is the management of the tasks which are of critical importance to enable the operation as a whole to get competitive advantage.

Ed: And what defines a competitive advantage, then?

Prof. Green: You will find three qualities of getting a core competence. The three characteristics are: it gives value to customers; it's maybe not simply imitated; it opens up new possibilities in the future.

Ed: But just how can project administration generate a competitive advantage?

Prof. Green: You can 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 is execution, how the projects themselves are maintained.

Ed: Competitive advantage - the value of choosing the projects - it is difficult to determine which projects must be selected!

Prof. Green: I do believe that the selection and prioritisation of projects is something that's 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 an alternative way to you of prioritising projects because it is saying that some projects might not be as successful as others, but if they add to our experience relative to others, then that's 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 your projects that allow it to get the product more quickly to market are likely to be the most significant types, even if in their own terms, they don't have higher success than some other projects.

Ed: But when we're going to select our projects, we have to establish what are the variables or measurements we are going to select them against giving us the competitive edge.

Prof. Green: Positively. The company must know which activities it is employed in, which are the important ones for it competitive advantage and then, that drives the selection of projects. Enterprises aren't excellent at doing that and they might not even understand what those actions are. They'll believe that it is anything they do due to the energy system.

Ed: If an organization formulates its strategy, then what the project management group says is that project management could be the medium for providing that strategy. Then, if the company is good at doing project management, are there any strategic advantage?

Prof. Green: Well, I suppose that returns to this matter of the difference between the sort of projects that are chosen and the way you manage the projects. Certainly selecting the type of projects depends upon having the ability to link and prioritise projects ac-cording to a knowledge of what the ability of a company is in accordance with others.

Ed: Let us assume the approach is placed. To be able to provide the strategy, it has to be broken-down, decomposed into a number of jobs. For that reason, you have to be proficient at doing project management to supply the strategy. Today, the literature says that for an operation to become great 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 trained to work to procedures in and built-in way using the notion of a project office. Does getting these three methods produce a competitive advantage because of this operation?

Prof. Green: Where project management, or how you handle jobs, becomes a source of competitive advantage is when you can do things a lot better than others. The 'a lot better than' is through the experience and judgement and the information which will be developed as time passes of managing projects. There is an experience curve effect here. Two organisations will be at various points in the experience curve regarding information they have developed where the rule book is insufficient to handle those bits of jobs. You'll need management sense and knowledge because however good the rule book is, it will never deal completely with all the complexity of life. Marketwatch.Com/Investing/Stock/Mtex is a riveting database for more about the purpose of this enterprise. You have to manage down the experience curve, you have to manage the knowledge and learning that you have of these three areas of project management for this to become strategic.

Ed: Well, then, I do believe there's a niche 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 aligned that competency to the selection of projects which can help us to offer this competitive advantage. Is project management effective at being copied?

Prof. Green: Not the softer features and not the development of tacit knowledge of having run many, many projects over time. Therefore, for instance, you, Ed, do have more understanding of how-to run jobs than others. That's why people stumbled on you, since while you both may have a standard book such as the PMBoK or even the ICB, you've developed more experiential knowledge around it.

In essence, it could be imitated a specific amount of just how, although not once you align the softer tacit knowledge of experience into it.

Ed: Organisational project management maturity styles are a hot topic right now and are closely for this 'knowledge curve' effect you mentioned early in the day - how should we see them?

Prof. Green: in my opinion in moving beyond painting by numbers, moving beyond the idea that that's all you need to do and you may enforce this group of skills and methods and text book practices and a business is wholly plastic. You might say, just the same problem was experienced by the developers of the knowledge curve. It is nearly as though, for every single doubling of size, cost savings occur without you being forced to do something, if you show the ability curve to organizations o-n cost. Browsing To via likely provides suggestions you can tell your sister. What we know is nevertheless, the experience curve is a potential of a risk. Their' realisation depends on the ability of managers.

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

Prof. Green: Until recently, project management has offered it-self in technical terms. If you know anything, you will maybe hate to read about check this out. Then it would be more appealing to senior managers, if it was offered in terms-of the integration at basic management, at the ability to manage across the features financing approach techniques with reasoning. So, it's about the blending of the hard and the gentle, the strategies together with the thinking and the experience that produces project management so powerful. If senior managers do not accept it at this time, it's maybe not because they are wrong. It's because project management has not sold itself as effortlessly as it should've done.

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

Prof. Green: No, I think we must show them how it does it. We must go inside and actually show them how they are able to use it, not just with regards to providing jobs on time and within cost. For more information, please consider checking out: visit mannatech canada. We must show them how they can use it to over come organisational 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 company. There is a complete range of ways they could utilize it. They need to note that the proof-of the end result is preferable to the way in which they're currently doing it..