Recently, numerous the world's leading project management organisations took major initiatives to show executive management in regards to the strategic value and benefits of project management. The focus would be to move from individual project management to organisational project management, which these organizations keep is a strategic advantage in a competitive economy.
In this essay, 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 (formerly 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 is the management of those tasks that are of crucial importance to enable the business as a whole to own competitive advantage.
Ed: And what defines a competitive advantage, then?
Prof. Green: You can find three attributes of having a core competence. The three characteristics are: it gives value to customers; it's not easily imitated; it opens up new opportunities later on.
Ed: But how can project administration yield a competitive advantage?
Prof. Green: There are two elements to project management. One aspect is the actual choice of the type of projects that the organisation partcipates in, and subsequently there's implementation, how a projects themselves are handled.
Ed: Competitive advantage - the significance of choosing the projects - it's not easy to determine which projects ought to be selected!
Prof. Green: I believe that the choice and prioritisation of tasks is something that's not been done well within the project management literature because it is essentially been thought away through reducing it to economic 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 when they add to our proficiency relative to others, then that is going to be important.
Therefore, to just take an example, if a company's competitive advantage is introducing new services more quickly than others, pharmaceuticals, let us say, finding product to market more quickly, then your projects that enable it to acquire the product more quickly to market will function as the most important ones, even if in their own terms, they don't have higher success than other sorts of projects.
Ed: But if we're going to select our tasks, we've to define what are the parameters or measurements we are going to select them against that provide us the competitive advantage.
Prof. Green: Positively. The enterprise needs to know which activities it is involved in, which are the important ones for it competitive advantage and then, that drives the choice of projects. Firms aren't great at doing that and they could not even understand what those activities are. They'll believe it is everything they do due to the energy system.
Ed: If a company formulates its strategy, then what the project management community says is that project management will be the method for delivering that strategy. Then, if the organisation is great at doing project management, is there any strategic advantage?
Prof. Green: Well, perhaps that comes back to this issue of the difference between the kind of projects that are chosen and the way you manage the projects. Certainly selecting the sort of projects depends on being able to link and prioritise projects according to an understanding of what the capability of an enterprise is in accordance with others.
Ed: Let's suppose that the strategy is defined. In order to provide the strategy, it has to be separated, decomposed into some tasks. For that reason, you have to be great at doing project management to supply the strategy. Today, the literature says that for a business to become great at doing tasks it has 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 integrated way utilizing the concept of a project office. Does taking these three ways produce a competitive advantage with this enterprise?
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 can be built up with time of managing projects. There is an event curve effect here. Two companies will soon be at different points in the experience curve regarding knowledge they've built-up where the rule book is inadequate to handle those components of projects. You need management thinking and experience because however good the rule book is, it will never deal completely using the complexity of life. You have to manage down the experience curve, you've to manage the learning and understanding that you've of the three aspects of project management for it to become strategic. My friend learned about ambrotose by searching books in the library.
Ed: Well, then, I do believe there is a niche there that's to be addressed as well, in that we have now created a competency at doing project management to do projects, but we have not arranged that competency to the choice of projects which will help us to offer this competitive edge. Is project management effective at being imitated?
Prof. Green: Not the softer features and not the develop-ment of tacit knowledge of having run many, many jobs over-time. So, like, you, Ed, have significantly more familiarity with just how to run tasks than others. That is why people found you, since while you both may have a standard book like the PMBoK or the ICB, you have created more experiential knowledge around it.
Basically, it may be imitated a specific amount of the way in which, but not if 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 earlier in the day - how should we see them?
Prof. Green: in my opinion in moving beyond painting by figures, moving beyond the idea that that's all you need to do and you can demand this group of processes and capabilities and text book practices and a company is wholly plastic. This prodound sponsors site has limitless rousing warnings for when to acknowledge this idea. In a way, exactly the same problem was experienced by the developers of the knowledge curve. If you show companies the knowledge curve on cost, it is almost as though, for every single doubling of size, cost reductions occur without you needing to do any such thing. What we know is however, that the experience curve is a potential of the risk. Its' realisation is dependent upon the ability of managers.
Ed: Are senior executives/chief executives in the attitude to appreciate the possible benefits of project management?
Prof. Green: Until recently, project management has promoted it-self in technical terms. Then it would be much more appealing to senior executives, if it was promoted in terms-of the integration at general management, at the capability to manage across the features lending approach techniques with sense. So, it is about the blending of the difficult and the smooth, the strategies with the thinking and the ability that makes project management so strong. If senior managers do not accept it right now, it's perhaps not because they're wrong. It's because project management has not sold itself as efficiently as it should've done.
Ed: Do we have to offer to senior executives and chief executives that it'll produce competitive advantage to them?
Prof. I discovered mannateck by browsing webpages. Green: No, I do believe we need to demonstrate to them how it does it. We have to go inside and really show them how they are able to use it, not just in terms of providing assignments on time and within cost. We must demonstrate to them how they can use it to overcome resistance to change, how they can use it to enhance capabilities and activities that lead to competitive edge, how they can use it to enhance the tacit knowledge in the business. There's an entire array of ways they are able to use it. They should note that the evidence of the end result is preferable to the way in which they're currently doing it..
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