Recently, a number of the world's major project management companies have taken major initiatives to illuminate executive management concerning the strategic value and advantages of project management. The emphasis is always 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 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 car for competitive advantage.
Ed: What does one point strategic Project Management is?
Prof. Green: Strategic project management is the management of the projects that are of critical importance to help the operation as a whole to own competitive advantage.
Ed: And what defines a competitive advantage, then?
Prof. Green: You can find three features of experiencing a core competence. The three characteristics are: it gives value to customers; it is perhaps not easily imitated; it opens up new opportunities in the future.
Ed: But just how can project management yield a competitive advantage?
Prof. Green: You will find two aspects to project management. One aspect is the actual selection of the sort of projects that the organisation partcipates in, and secondly there is implementation, how a projects themselves are managed.
Ed: Competitive advantage - the importance of selecting the correct projects - it's difficult to determine which projects must be chosen!
Prof. Green: I do believe that the choice and prioritisation of projects is something that has not been done well within-the project management literature because it's basically been thought away through reducing it to financial analysis. The strategic imperative gives an alternative way to you of prioritising projects because it is saying that some projects might not be as profitable as others, but when 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, drugs, let's say, finding product to market more quickly, then a projects that allow it to obtain the product more quickly to market are likely to be the most important ones, even if in their own terms, they don't have higher success than some other projects.
Ed: But when we are going to select our tasks, we've to define what are the boundaries or measurements we're going to select them against that give the competitive advantage to us.
Prof. Green: Positively. The business must know which activities it is involved in, which are the important ones for it then and competitive advantage, that drives the choice of projects. Firms are not excellent at doing that and they could not even know what those activities are. They'll believe that it is every thing they do because of the energy system.
Ed: If its strategy is formulated by a company, then what the project management group says is that project management may be the medium for delivering that strategy. Then, if the company is good at doing project management, is there any strategic advantage?
Prof. Green: Well, perhaps that comes home to this matter of the difference between the type of projects that are selected and the way you manage the projects. Clearly selecting the type of projects depends on being able to link and prioritise projects according to an understanding of what the capability of an organisation is in accordance with others.
Ed: Let's assume the technique is set. In order to deliver the strategy, it has to be broken-down, decomposed into a number of projects. Therefore, you should be proficient at doing project management to supply the strategy. Today, the literature says that for an enterprise to become good at doing tasks it's to: place 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 integrated way utilizing the concept of a project company. Does getting those three steps produce a competitive advantage for this enterprise?
Prof. Green: Where project management, or how you manage projects, becomes a source of competitive advantage is when you can do things a lot better than others. The 'better-than' is through the ability and reasoning and the knowledge which can be developed with time of managing projects. There is an experience curve effect here. Two companies will be at different points in the experience curve as to the information they've built up where the rule book is limited to control these items of tasks. You need management thinking and experience because however good the rule book is, it'll never deal entirely using the complexity of life. You have to manage down the experience curve, you have to manage the learning and understanding that you have of these three facets of project management because of it to become proper.
Ed: Well, then, I believe there is a niche there that's to be resolved as well, in that we have now produced a competency at doing project management to do projects, but we have not arranged that competency to the selection of projects which will help us to offer this competitive edge. Is project management capable of being copied?
Prof. To get another perspective, please check out: visit link. Green: Not the softer features and not the devel-opment of tacit knowledge of having run many, many jobs with time. If you think you know any thing, you will possibly desire to learn about rent glyconutrient. Therefore, like, you, Ed, have significantly more knowledge of how to work jobs than others. That's why people found you, because while you both might have a standard book like the PMBoK or the ICB, you've created more experiential knowledge around it.
Essentially, it may be imitated a quantity of the way in which, but not if you arrange the smoother tacit knowledge of experience into it.
Ed: Organisational project management maturity styles are a hot topic right now and are closely for this '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 idea that an enterprise is completely plastic and you may demand this set of capabilities and processes and text book standards and that is all you have to do. In a way, exactly the same problem was experienced by the developers of the experience curve. It is almost like, for each doubling of size, cost reductions occur without you having to do any such thing, if you show the knowledge curve to companies on cost. What we know is though, that the experience curve is a potential of the chance. Their' realisation is dependent upon the ability of professionals.
Ed: Are senior executives/chief executives in-the attitude to understand the potential benefits of project management?
Prof. Green: Until recently, project management has offered it-self in technical terms. Then it would be more attractive to senior executives, if it was promoted in terms-of the integration at common management, at the ability to manage throughout the characteristics financing approach techniques with thinking. So, it's about the experience that makes project management so powerful, the methods together with the thinking and the mixing of the difficult and the soft. If senior executives don't embrace it right now, it's perhaps not as they are wrong. It's because project management hasn't sold it self as efficiently as it should've done.
Ed: Do we have to sell to chief executives and senior executives that it'll produce competitive advantage for them?
Prof. Green: No, I do believe we must show them how it does it. We have to go in there and actually show them how they are able to use it, not merely with regards to delivering projects on time and within cost. We have to 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 advantage, how they can use it to enhance the tacit knowledge in the enterprise. There is a whole range of ways in which they could utilize it. They have to observe that the proof-of the outcome surpasses just how they're currently doing it..
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