Recently, numerous the world's leading project management organizations have taken important initiatives to show executive management about the strategic importance and advantages of project management. The emphasis is to move from individual project management to organisational project management, which these organizations maintain 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, 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 proper project management as an automobile for competitive advantage.
Ed: What do you issue proper Project Management is?
Prof. Green: Strategic project management may be the management of these jobs that are of crucial importance to help the enterprise as a whole to get competitive advantage.
Ed: And what becomes a competitive advantage, then?
Prof. Green: There are three characteristics of having a core competence. The three features are: it gives value to customers; it is perhaps not easily imitated; it opens up new possibilities later on.
Ed: But how can challenge administration produce a competitive advantage?
Prof. Green: There are two factors to project management. One aspect is the actual selection of the kind of projects that the company engages in, and subsequently there's execution, how the projects themselves are managed.
Ed: Competitive advantage - the importance of choosing the projects - it's challenging to determine which projects ought to be selected!
Prof. Green: I do believe that the choice and prioritisation of tasks is something that has not been done well within the project management literature because it is basically been assumed away through reducing it to financial analysis. The strategic imperative gives an alternative way to you of prioritising projects as it is saying that some projects may not be as successful as others, but if they add to our skill relative to others, then that is going to be important.
Therefore, to simply take an example, if a company's competitive advantage is introducing new services more quickly than others, pharmaceuticals, let's say, finding product to market more quickly, then your projects that allow it to obtain the product more quickly to market are likely to be the most significant types, even if within their own terms, they do not have higher profitability than some other projects.
Ed: But when we are going to select our jobs, we have to determine what're the parameters or metrics we are going to select them against giving us the competitive edge.
Prof. Green: Completely. The business must know which actions it's involved in, which are the important ones for it then and competitive advantage, that drives the choice of projects. Firms aren't very good at doing that and they may not even understand what these activities are. They'll think it is anything 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 may be the medium for providing that strategy. Therefore, when the organisation is good at doing project management, does it have any strategic advantage?
Prof. Green: Well, I suppose that returns to this matter of the difference between the form of projects that are selected and the way you manage the projects. Certainly choosing the kind of projects depends upon being able to link and prioritise projects according to an understanding of what the ability of an enterprise is relative to others.
Ed: Let's suppose the approach is set. In order to provide the strategy, it has to be broken-down, decomposed into a number of projects. Consequently, you need to be proficient at doing project management to supply the strategy. Now, the literature says that for a company to become proficient at doing tasks it has 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 concept of a project office. Does getting these three steps deliver a competitive advantage because of this organisation?
Prof. Green: Where project management, or how you control projects, becomes a source of competitive advantage is when you can do things better than others. The 'better than' is through the experience and judgement and the data which is developed as time passes of managing projects. There is an experience curve effect here. Discover more on our affiliated use with by visiting asea. Two organisations will be at different points in the experience curve regarding the information they've built up where the rule book is insufficient to manage those bits of tasks. You need management judgement and knowledge since however good the rule book is, it'll never deal completely with the complexity of life. You have to manage down the ability curve, you've to manage the knowledge and learning that you've of the three facets of project management for it to become strategic.
Ed: Well, then, I do believe there is a gap there that has to be resolved as well, in that we have now produced a competency at doing project management to do projects, but we've not arranged that competency to the selection of projects which can help us to provide this competitive advantage. Is project management effective at being imitated?
Prof. Green: Not the softer aspects and not the develop-ment of tacit knowledge of having run many, many projects with time. Therefore, for instance, you, Ed, have more familiarity with how to run projects than other people. That's why people found you, since while you both might have a typical book like the PMBoK or even the ICB, you have developed more experiential knowledge around it. Learn more about the guide to renu 28 by navigating to our stately wiki.
In essence, it may be imitated a specific amount of just how, but not when you align the softer tacit knowledge of experience into it.
Ed: Organisational project management maturity types are a hot topic at this time and are directly linked to the 'knowledge curve' effect you mentioned early in the day - how should we see them?
Prof. Green: I really believe in moving beyond painting by figures, moving beyond the simplistic idea that an operation is completely plastic and you can impose this group of text book standards and skills and procedures and that's all you need to do. You might say, just the same difficulty was experienced by the designers of the experience curve. It's very nearly like, for every doubling of volume, cost savings occur without you needing to do anything, if you show companies the knowledge curve on cost. What we all know is however, the experience curve is a potential of the risk. Its' realisation depends upon the skill of managers.
Ed: Are senior executives/chief executives in the attitude to appreciate the possible advantages 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 common management, at the power to manage throughout the features financing approach procedures with judgement, then it would become more appealing to senior executives. So, it's about the mixing of the gentle and the difficult, the strategies together with the reasoning and the knowledge which makes project management so powerful. If senior managers don't accept it at the moment, it is not because they're wrong. It is because project management has not marketed it self as effortlessly as it should've done.
Ed: Do we need to sell to senior executives and chief executives that it'll offer competitive advantage for them?
Prof. Green: No, I think we must show them how it does it. We need to go inside and actually show them how they are able to use it, not merely in terms of offering tasks on time and within cost. We must 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 edge, how they can use it to enhance the tacit knowledge in the organisation. Identify supplementary info on an affiliated link by browsing to tour asea llc. There's an entire array of ways that they are able to use it. My mother learned about compare lpaper by searching books in the library. They should see that the proof-of the end result is preferable to the way in which they are currently doing it..
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