Strategic Project Management A Competitive Edge

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Recently, a number of the world's major project management organizations took important initiatives to show executive management regarding the strategic value and benefits of project management. Dig up further about benefits of asea by visiting our fresh use with. The emphasis would be to move from specific 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 present 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 proper project management as a vehicle for competitive advantage.

Ed: What do you point proper Project Management is?

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

Ed: And what defines a competitive advantage, then?

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

Ed: But how can project management deliver a competitive advantage?

Prof. Green: There are two elements to project management. One element is the actual collection of the kind of projects that the business partcipates in, and subsequently there is implementation, the way the projects themselves are handled. Identify supplementary info on this affiliated paper by browsing to https://www.law.ox.ac.uk/people/chris-brummer.

Ed: Competitive advantage - the importance of choosing the projects - it's difficult to determine which projects must be selected!

Prof. Green: I do believe that the selection and prioritisation of tasks is something that's not been done well within-the project management literature because it's essentially been assumed away through reducing it to financial analysis. The strategic imperative gives an alternative way to you of prioritising projects since 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's going to be important.

Therefore, to take an illustration, if a company's competitive advantage is introducing services more quickly than the others, drugs, let's say, getting product to market more quickly, then your projects that enable it to acquire 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 productivity than some other projects.

Ed: But if we are going to select our projects, we've to establish what're the details or metrics we are going to select them against that provide us the competitive edge.

Prof. Green: Absolutely. The company needs to know which activities it's involved in, which are the important ones for it competitive advantage and then, that drives the choice of projects. We discovered aseas on-line by browsing newspapers. Organisations are not great at doing that and they might not even understand what those activities are. They'll think it is everything they do because of the energy system.

Ed: If a company formulates its strategy, then what the project management group says is that project management may be the medium for delivering that strategy. Then, when the enterprise is good at doing project management, are there any strategic advantage?

Prof. Green: Well, perhaps that comes home to this problem of the difference between the sort of projects that are selected and the way you manage the projects. Certainly selecting the type of projects depends on having the ability to link and prioritise projects ac-cording to a knowledge of what the potential of an organisation is relative to others.

Ed: Let us suppose the technique is defined. In order to produce the strategy, it has to be broken down, decomposed into a number of tasks. Thus, you should be great at doing project management to supply the strategy. Now, the literature says that for a business to be good 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 qualified to work to procedures in and integrated way using the notion of a project company. Does using these three methods produce a competitive advantage because of this organisation?

Prof. Green: Where project management, or how you handle tasks, becomes a source of competitive advantage is when you can do things better than others. The 'better-than' is through the experience and reasoning and the data which is built up over time of managing projects. There is an experience curve effect here. Two organisations will be at various points in the experience curve as to the information they have accumulated to control these bits of jobs where the rule book is limited. You need knowledge and management judgement since however good the rule book is, it will never deal entirely using the complexity of life. You've to manage down the ability curve, you've to manage the learning and understanding that you have of the three aspects of project management because of it to become strategic.

Ed: Well, then, I do believe there is a gap there that's to be addressed as well, in that we have now developed a competency at doing project management to do projects, but we have not aimed that competency to the choice of projects which may help us to offer this competitive advantage. Is project management with the capacity of being imitated?

Prof. Green: Not the softer elements and not the development of tacit knowledge of having run many, many jobs over time. So, for instance, you, Ed, have significantly more familiarity with how to work projects than other people. Clicking mannatech products australia maybe provides warnings you might give to your dad. That's why people stumbled on you, because while you both might have a regular book such as the PMBoK or even the ICB, you've developed more experiential knowledge around it.

Essentially, it can be imitated a quantity of just how, however not if you arrange the smoother tacit knowledge of experience into it.

Ed: Organisational project management maturity designs are a hot topic at this time and are closely linked to the 'knowledge curve' effect you mentioned ear-lier - how should we view them?

Prof. Green: I really believe in moving beyond painting by quantities, moving beyond the idea that that's all you have to do and you may encourage this group of skills and methods and text book practices and an operation is wholly plastic. In ways, just the same problem was experienced by the developers of the knowledge curve. If you show the ability curve to companies o-n cost, it's almost as though, for each and every doubling of size, cost savings occur without you having to do something. What we know is nevertheless, the experience curve is a potential of a possibility. Their' realisation is dependent upon the skill of professionals.

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. If it was promoted in terms-of the integration at basic management, at the ability to manage across the functions financing process procedures with sense, then it would become more attractive to senior executives. So, it's about the mixing of the smooth and the hard, the methods with the sense and the experience that makes project management so strong. If senior executives do not embrace it at the moment, it's maybe not because they are wrong. It's because project management has not promoted itself as effortlessly as it should've done.

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

Prof. Green: No, I think we must show them how it does it. We have to go in there and really show them how they are able to use it, not just in terms of delivering projects on time and within cost. We need to show them how they can use it to over come organisational resistance to change, how they can use it to enhance capabilities and actions that cause competitive advantage, how they can use it to enhance the tacit knowledge in the organisation. There's a complete array of ways in which they could utilize it. They must observe that the proof of the results is better than the way they're currently doing it..