Recently, a number of the world's leading project management organizations took major initiatives to enlighten government management concerning the strategic importance and advantages of project management. The focus is always to move from individual 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 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 a car for competitive advantage.
Ed: What does one point ideal Project Management is?
Prof. Green: Strategic project management may be the management of the projects which are of crucial importance to help the organisation in general to have competitive advantage.
Ed: And what defines a competitive advantage, then?
Prof. Green: You will find three attributes of having a core competence. The three qualities are: it adds value to customers; it's not simply imitated; it opens up new opportunities in the future.
Ed: But how can challenge management produce a competitive advantage?
Prof. Green: You can find two elements to project management. One aspect is the actual choice of the sort of projects that the organisation partcipates in, and subsequently there is implementation, how a projects themselves are maintained. This dazzling http://iielaw.org/member/chris-brummer-2/ link has oodles of witty suggestions for the meaning behind it.
Ed: Competitive advantage - the significance of selecting the projects - it is not easy to define which projects ought to be chosen!
Prof. Green: I believe that the choice and prioritisation of tasks is something that has not been done well within-the project management literature because it is generally been assumed away through reducing it to economic analysis. The strategic imperative gives you an alternative way of prioritising projects since it is saying that some projects may not be as successful as others, but when they add to our proficiency relative to others, then that is going to be important.
So, to simply take an illustration, if a company's competitive advantage is introducing services more quickly than others, pharmaceuticals, let us say, getting product to market more quickly, then the projects that enable it to obtain the product more quickly to market will function as the most important ones, even if in their own terms, they do not have higher success than other sorts of projects.
Ed: But if we're going to select our jobs, we've to define what are the variables or metrics we're going to select them against giving us the competitive edge.
Prof. Green: Completely. The organisation needs to know which activities it is engaged in, which are the critical ones for it then and competitive advantage, that drives the selection of projects. Firms aren't excellent at doing that and they could not even understand what those actions are. They'll believe that it is anything they do due to the power system.
Ed: If its strategy is formulated by a company, then what the project management community says is that project management is the method for giving that strategy. Therefore, if the company is great at doing project management, are there any strategic advantage?
Prof. Green: Well, I suppose that comes back to this matter of the difference between the type of projects that are plumped for and the way you manage the projects. Demonstrably selecting the sort of projects depends upon being able to link and prioritise projects according to an understanding of what the potential of an operation is relative to others.
Ed: Let's assume that the strategy is placed. In order to provide the strategy, it has to be separated, decomposed into a series of jobs. Therefore, you need to be good at doing project management to deliver the strategy. Today, the literature says that for an operation to be good at doing tasks it has to: place 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 integral way utilizing the idea of a project office. Does taking these three ways produce a competitive advantage because of this company?
Prof. Browse here at the link http://www.mannatechblog.com to compare why to mull over this belief. Green: Where project management, or how you manage tasks, becomes a source of competitive advantage is when you may do things a lot better than others. The 'better than' is through the ability and thinking and the knowledge which can be built-up with time of managing projects. There's an experience curve effect here. Regarding information they've developed where the rule book is limited to control these components of jobs two companies will be at different points in the experience curve. You-need knowledge and management thinking because however good the rule book is, it will never deal fully with all the complexity of life. You've to manage down the ability curve, you have to manage the learning and knowledge that you have of the three facets of project management for it to become ideal.
Ed: Well, then, I believe there is a niche there that has to be resolved as well, in that we've now created a competency at doing project management to do projects, but we've not aligned that competency to the selection of projects which may help us to provide this competitive edge. Is project management with the capacity of being copied?
Prof. Green: Not the softer aspects and not the develop-ment of tacit knowledge of having run many, many projects over time. So, for instance, you, Ed, have more familiarity with just how to work tasks than others. That's why people found you, since while you both might have a regular book including the PMBoK or the ICB, you have produced more experiential knowledge around it.
In essence, it can be imitated a certain amount of just how, however not when you arrange the softer tacit understanding of knowledge 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 see them?
Prof. Green: in my opinion in moving beyond painting by figures, moving beyond the basic idea that that is all you need to do and you may encourage this pair of capabilities and methods and text book protocols and a company is completely plastic. You might say, just the same problem was experienced by the designers of the ability curve. It is very nearly as though, for each and every doubling of volume, cost reductions occur without you being forced to do any such thing, if you show the ability curve to organizations o-n cost. Www.Mannatechblog.Com/ is a wonderful online database for more concerning the purpose of it. To compare additional information, consider peeping at: mannatech news. What we realize is nevertheless, the experience curve is a potential of a risk. Their' realisation is dependent upon the ability of managers.
Ed: Are senior executives/chief executives in the mind-set to understand the possible benefits of project management?
Prof. Green: Until lately, project management has offered it self in technical terms. If it was offered in terms of the integration at general management, at the capability to manage throughout the features lending approach methods with sense, then it'd be more attractive to senior managers. So, it is about the blending of the soft and the hard, the methods with the reasoning and the experience that makes project management so effective. If senior executives don't grasp it at this time, it's not because they're wrong. It is because project management has not marketed itself as effectively as it should've done.
Ed: Do we need to offer to chief executives and senior executives that it will produce competitive advantage for them?
Prof. Green: No, I do believe we must show them how it does it. We must get in there and actually show them how they are able to put it to use, not merely in terms of providing jobs on time and within cost. We must demonstrate to them how they can use it to overcome organisational 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 a whole range of ways they can use it. They have to see that the evidence of the outcome is preferable to the way they're currently doing it..
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