Strategic Project Management

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Recently, several the world's leading project management firms have taken important initiatives to show executive management concerning the strategic importance and benefits of project management. The emphasis would be to move from specific project management to organisational project management, which these enterprises maintain 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, 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 proper project management as a vehicle for competitive advantage.

Ed: What do you point ideal Project Management is?

Prof. Green: Strategic project management is the management of the tasks that are of critical importance to allow the enterprise in general to have competitive advantage.

Ed: And what defines a competitive advantage, then?

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

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

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

Ed: Competitive advantage - the importance of selecting the correct projects - it's not easy to establish which projects should be chosen!

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

So, to just take an illustration, if a company's competitive advantage is introducing new products more quickly than the others, pharmaceuticals, let us say, getting product to market more quickly, then a projects that allow it to acquire the product more quickly to market are likely to function as the most important ones, even if within their own terms, they do not have higher productivity than other sorts of projects.

Ed: But when we're going to select our projects, we've to determine what're the details or metrics we're going to select them against giving us the competitive edge.

Prof. Green: Positively. The organisation has to know which activities it is involved in, which are the critical ones for it then and competitive advantage, that drives the selection of projects. Organisations are not excellent at doing that and they might not even know what those activities are. They will believe that it is anything they do because of the power system.

Ed: If an organization formulates its strategy, then what the project management community says is that project management will be the medium for delivering that strategy. If you know any thing, you will maybe require to research about powered by. Then, if the organisation is good at doing project management, is there any strategic advantage?

Prof. Green: Well, I suppose that returns to this issue of the difference between the kind of projects that are chosen and the way you manage the projects. Demonstrably selecting the sort of projects depends upon having the ability to link and prioritise projects according to an understanding of what the ability of an operation is relative to others.

Ed: Let's suppose that the technique is set. In order to provide the strategy, it has to be broken-down, decomposed into a series of jobs. Therefore, you need to be great at doing project management to deliver the strategy. Today, the literature says that for an enterprise to become great at doing jobs it has to: put 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 integrated way utilizing the notion of a project company. Does using those three measures offer a competitive advantage for this company?

Prof. Green: Where project management, or how you manage jobs, becomes a source of competitive advantage is when you can do things better than others. The 'better than' is through the experience and sense and the data which will be built up as time passes of managing projects. There is an experience curve effect here. Regarding the information they've built-up where the rule book is inadequate to handle those bits of tasks two companies will soon be at various points in the experience curve. You-need knowledge and management thinking because however good the rule book is, it will never deal entirely using the complexity of life. You have to manage down the ability curve, you've to manage the knowledge and learning that you've of those three facets of project management for this to become proper.

Ed: Well, then, I think there's a niche there that's to be addressed as well, in that we have now produced a competency at doing project management to do projects, but we have not aligned that competency to the selection of projects which may help us to offer this competitive advantage. Is project management capable of being imitated?

Prof. Green: Not the softer features and not the devel-opment of tacit knowledge of having run many, many jobs over time. Therefore, like, you, Ed, do have more understanding of how-to work jobs than others. That's why people stumbled on you, because while you both might have a typical book including the PMBoK or the ICB, you've created more experiential knowledge around it.

Basically, it can be imitated a quantity of the way in which, 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 directly for this 'experience curve' effect you mentioned early in the day - how should we see them?

Prof. Green: in my opinion in moving beyond painting by figures, moving beyond the basic idea that that is all you should do and you can impose this pair of capabilities and processes and text book standards and an enterprise is completely plastic. You might say, exactly the same problem was experienced by the builders of the knowledge curve. If you show organizations the knowledge curve on cost, it's very nearly like, for each doubling of size, cost reductions occur without you having to do such a thing. What we all know is nevertheless, the experience curve is a potential of a chance. Dig up more on the affiliated article directory by going to close remove frame. Its' realisation depends upon the skill of administrators.

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

Prof. Green: Until lately, project management has promoted it self in technical terms. Then it would be more appealing to senior managers, if it was promoted in terms-of the integration at standard management, at the power to manage throughout the functions lending process techniques with sense. So, it's about the mixing of the gentle and the difficult, the practices with the judgement and the experience that produces project management so effective. I discovered ambrotose by browsing Yahoo. If senior managers do not accept it right now, it's maybe not because they are wrong. It's because project management has not sold it self as effectively as it should've done.

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

Prof. Green: No, I do believe we must demonstrate to them how it does it. We must go inside and actually show them how they could put it to use, not only with regards to delivering projects on time and within cost. We must show them how they can use it to over come 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 organisation. There's an entire array of ways in which they are able to put it to use. They need to observe that the evidence of the results is better than just how they are currently doing it..