Strategic Project Management A Competitive Edge

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Recently, a number of the world's leading project management companies have taken major initiatives to enlighten executive management in regards to the strategic importance and benefits of project management. The emphasis is to move from individual project management to organisational project management, which these organisations maintain is a strategic advantage in a competitive economy. If you think anything, you will probably wish to compare about close window.

In this essay, Ed Naughton, Director General of the Institute of Project Management and present 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 strategic project management as an automobile for competitive advantage.

Ed: What does one point ideal Project Management is?

Prof. Green: Strategic project management is the management of those projects which are of crucial importance to enable the company in general to own competitive advantage.

Ed: And what becomes a competitive advantage, then?

Prof. Green: There are three features of having a core competence. The three qualities are: it adds value to customers; it is maybe not easily imitated; it opens up new possibilities later on.

Ed: But how can challenge management provide a competitive advantage?

Prof. Green: There are two factors to project management. One element is the actual collection of the sort of projects that the business partcipates in, and subsequently there is implementation, how the projects themselves are managed.

Ed: Competitive advantage - the significance of selecting the projects - it's difficult to define which projects ought to be selected!

Prof. Green: I believe that the selection and prioritisation of tasks is something that has not been done well within-the project management literature because it is basically been thought away through reducing it to economic analysis. The strategic imperative gives a different way to you of prioritising projects because it is saying that some projects might not be as profitable as others, but if they add to our competency relative to others, then that's going to be important.

So, to take an illustration, if a company's competitive advantage is introducing services more quickly than the others, drugs, let's say, finding product to market more quickly, then the projects that allow it to get the product more quickly to market are going to be the most critical types, even if in their own terms, they don't have higher productivity than other sorts of projects.

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

Prof. Green: Definitely. The organisation has to know which actions it's engaged in, which are the critical ones for it then and competitive advantage, that drives the choice of projects. Enterprises are not very good at doing that and they could not even know what those activities are. They will think it is every thing 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 will be the channel for providing that strategy. Therefore, when the company is good at doing project management, does it have any strategic advantage?

Prof. Green: Well, I guess that comes home to this issue of the difference between the form 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 enterprise is relative to others.

Ed: Let us assume the technique is set. My family friend discovered mannatech by browsing Google Books. In order to provide the strategy, it has to be broken down, decomposed into a series of jobs. For that reason, you should be great at doing project management to deliver the strategy. Now, the literature says that for an organisation to become proficient at doing jobs it's to: devote project management procedures, train people on how best to apply/do project management and co-ordinate the efforts of the people qualified to work to procedures in and built-in way utilizing the idea of a project office. Does getting those three methods deliver a competitive advantage because of this enterprise?

Prof. Green: Where project management, or how you handle tasks, becomes a source of competitive advantage is when you can do things a lot better than the others. The 'better than' is through the ability and sense and the data that will be built up over time of managing projects. There's an event curve effect here. Regarding the information they have developed where the rule book is inadequate to handle those bits of tasks two organisations will soon be at various points in the experience curve. You-need management thinking and experience because 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 understanding and learning that you've of the three areas of project management for it to become proper.

Ed: Well, then, I think there's a gap there that has to be addressed as well, in that we've now developed a competency at doing project management to do projects, but we have not aligned that competency to the choice of projects which can help us to give this competitive edge. Is project management effective at being copied?

Prof. Green: Not the softer elements and not the devel-opment of tacit understanding of having run many, many projects over time. So, like, you, Ed, have significantly more understanding of just how to run projects than others. That's why people found you, because while you both may have a standard book like the PMBoK or the ICB, you've produced more experiential knowledge around it.

Essentially, it can be copied a certain amount of the way, however not if you arrange the softer tacit understanding of experience into it.

Ed: Organisational project management maturity models are a hot topic at the moment and are directly linked to the 'knowledge curve' effect you mentioned earlier - how should we view them?

Prof. Green: in my opinion in moving beyond painting by numbers, moving beyond the basic idea that an organisation is completely plastic and you may enforce this set of capabilities and processes and text book methods and that's all you have to do. In a way, just the same problem was experienced by the builders of the knowledge curve. It's nearly like, for each and every doubling of size, cost reductions occur without you needing to do such a thing, if you show the experience curve to organizations o-n cost. What we know is nevertheless, that the experience curve is a potential of a possibility. Its' realisation is dependent upon the ability of administrators.

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

Prof. Green: Until recently, project management has promoted it self in technical terms. If it was offered in terms of the integration at common management, at the capability to manage throughout the functions lending approach processes with sense, then it'd be more appealing to senior managers. If you have an opinion about law, you will perhaps require to explore about https://www.linkedin.com/company/asea-llc. This commanding www.linkedin.com/company/asea-llc portfolio has specific staggering cautions for the meaning behind it. So, it's about the mixing of the soft and the difficult, the methods together with the reasoning and the experience that produces project management so powerful. If senior executives don't embrace it at this time, it is not because they are wrong. It's because project management hasn't marketed itself as effortlessly as it should've done.

Ed: Do we need to offer to chief executives and senior executives that it will deliver competitive advantage to them?

Prof. Green: No, I think we have to demonstrate to them how it does it. We need to go in there and really show them how they can put it to use, not merely in terms of delivering assignments on time and within cost. We need to show them how they can use it to overcome resistance to change, how they can use it to enhance capabilities and actions that cause competitive edge, how they can use it to enhance the tacit knowledge in the organisation. There's a whole range of ways that they can use it. They should see that the proof-of the end result is preferable to the way in which they are currently doing it..