Strategic Project Management A Competitive Edge

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Recently, numerous the world's major project management organisations took major initiatives to show executive management in regards to the strategic value and advantages of project management. The focus is always to move from specific project management to organisational project management, which these organisations keep is a strategic advantage in a competitive economy.

In this essay, 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 proper project management as an automobile for competitive advantage.

Ed: What do you thing ideal Project Management is?

Prof. Green: Strategic project management is the management of these jobs that are of crucial importance to enable the enterprise in general to get competitive advantage.

Ed: And what becomes 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 is not simply imitated; it opens up new opportunities later on.

Ed: But just how can project management yield a competitive advantage?

Prof. Green: There are two factors to project management. One part is the actual selection of the sort of projects that the organisation engages in, and secondly there's implementation, how the projects themselves are managed.

Ed: Competitive advantage - the significance of selecting the projects - it is challenging to define which projects should be selected!

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 is generally been assumed away through reducing it to financial analysis. The strategic imperative gives a different way to you of prioritising projects because it is saying that some projects may not be as successful as others, but if they add to our competency relative to others, then that is going to be important.

Therefore, to just take an illustration, if a company's competitive advantage is introducing new products more quickly than others, pharmaceuticals, let's say, finding product to market more quickly, then the projects that allow it to get the product more quickly to market are likely to function as the most significant types, even if within their own terms, they don't have higher success than various projects.

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

Prof. Green: Completely. The enterprise needs to know which activities it is employed in, which are the critical ones for it competitive advantage and then, that drives the choice of projects. Organisations aren't great at doing that and they might not even know what those actions are. They will believe it is everything they do because of the power system.

Ed: If a company formulates its strategy, then what the project management community says is that project management will be the channel for delivering that strategy. Then, if the business is good at doing project management, does it have any strategic advantage?

Prof. Green: Well, I suppose that comes back to this matter of the difference between the kind of projects that are plumped for and the way you manage the projects. Certainly selecting the type of projects depends upon being able to link and prioritise projects ac-cording to an understanding of what the potential of an operation is relative to others.

Ed: Let's suppose the method is defined. So that you can provide the strategy, it has to be divided, decomposed into a series of projects. To explore additional information, consider looking at: mannatech com. Thus, you need to be good at doing project management to deliver the strategy. Now, the literature says that for a company to become proficient at doing tasks it has to: put in 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 integral way using the idea of a project company. Does using these three measures deliver a competitive advantage for this enterprise?

Prof. Green: Where project management, or how you control projects, becomes a source of competitive advantage is when you can do things a lot better than others. The 'better than' is through the experience and reasoning and the information which will be developed with time of managing projects. There is an experience curve effect here. Regarding the information they've developed to handle those components of tasks where the rule book is limited two organisations will be at various points in the experience curve. You-need knowledge and management judgement since 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 knowledge and learning that you've of those three aspects of project management for it to become strategic.

Ed: Well, then, I believe there's a gap there that has to be resolved as well, in that we have now developed a competency at doing project management to do projects, but we've not aimed that competency to the selection of projects which can help us to offer this competitive advantage. Is project management able to being copied?

Prof. Green: Not the softer features and not the develop-ment of tacit understanding of having run many, many jobs with time. Therefore, for instance, you, Ed, have more knowledge of just how to work jobs than other people. Click here https://twitter.com/chrisbrummerdr to discover the meaning behind it. That's why people came to you, since while you both might have a typical book such as the PMBoK or the ICB, you have produced more experiential knowledge around it. Intangible includes more about when to provide for it.

Basically, it can be copied a certain amount of the-way, although not whenever you arrange the smoother tacit knowledge of knowledge into it.

Ed: Organisational project management maturity models are a hot topic at this time and are directly for this 'knowledge curve' effect you mentioned earlier in the day - how should we view them?

Prof. Green: I believe in moving beyond painting by numbers, moving beyond the idea that that is all you should do and you can impose this group of capabilities and processes and text book practices and an enterprise is wholly plastic. In ways, exactly the same problem was experienced by the builders of the experience curve. If you show companies the knowledge curve o-n cost, it is nearly like, for every single doubling of volume, cost reductions occur without you having to do such a thing. What we all know is however, the experience curve is a potential of the possibility. Their' realisation depends upon the skill of administrators.

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

Prof. Green: Until lately, project management has offered itself in technical terms. If it was promoted in terms of the integration at general management, at the capability to manage over the characteristics financing process techniques with judgement, then it'd be much more appealing to senior executives. So, it's about the ability which makes project management so effective, the strategies with the reasoning and the blending of the soft and the hard. If senior executives don't grasp it right now, it's maybe not as they are wrong. It's because project management has not marketed itself as effectively as it should've done.

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

Prof. Green: No, I do believe we need to demonstrate to them how it does it. We have to get in there and really show them how they are able to use it, not only in terms of providing assignments on time and within cost. We have to demonstrate to them how they can use it to over come organisational resistance to change, how they can use it to enhance capabilities and actions that lead to competitive advantage, how they can use it to enhance the tacit knowledge in the enterprise. There's a complete array of ways in which they could utilize it. They must observe that the proof-of the end result is preferable to just how they are currently doing it.. If you think any thing, you will likely wish to discover about the internet.