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Strategic Project Management A Competitive Edge

Recently, several the world's top project management organizations have taken major initiatives to enlighten government management about the strategic importance and benefits of project management. This fresh monero white paper article has several provocative suggestions for the meaning behind it. The emphasis would be to move from individual project management to organisational project management, which these organizations maintain is a strategic advantage in a competitive economy.

In this article, Ed Naughton, Director-general of the Institute of Project Management and recent 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 vehicle for competitive advantage.

Ed: What does one issue proper Project Management is?

Prof. Green: Strategic project management may be the management of these jobs which are of critical importance to help the organisation as a whole to own competitive advantage.

Ed: And what defines a competitive advantage, then?

Prof. Green: You will find three characteristics of getting a core competence. The three attributes are: it adds value to customers; it is maybe not easily imitated; it opens up new opportunities later on.

Ed: But how can project management generate a competitive advantage?

Prof. Green: You can find two elements to project management. One element is the actual choice of the type of projects that the organisation partcipates in, and secondly there's implementation, the way the projects themselves are maintained.

Ed: Competitive advantage - the importance of choosing the correct projects - it's challenging to establish which projects must be chosen!

Prof. Green: I believe that the choice and prioritisation of projects is something that has not been done well within-the project management literature because it is generally been thought 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 profitable as others, but if they add to our expertise relative to others, then that is going to be important.

So, to take an example, if a company's competitive advantage is introducing new products more quickly than the others, pharmaceuticals, let us say, finding product to market more quickly, then a projects that enable it to acquire the product more quickly to market are likely to function as the most important types, even if within their own terms, they don't have higher profitability than other sorts of projects.

Ed: But if we're going to select our tasks, we have to determine what're the boundaries or measurements we are going to select them against giving us the competitive advantage.

Prof. Green: Positively. The company needs to know which activities it is involved in, which are the important ones for it then and competitive advantage, that drives the selection of projects. Organizations aren't very good at doing that and they may not even understand what those actions are. They'll believe it is everything they do because of the power system.

Ed: If its strategy is formulated by a company, then what the project management community says is that project management may be the method for delivering that strategy. Therefore, when the operation is great at doing project management, is there any strategic advantage?

Prof. Green: Well, I suppose that returns to this matter of the difference between the form of projects that are chosen and the way you manage the projects. Obviously selecting the kind of projects depends on being able to link and prioritise projects ac-cording to an understanding of what the ability of a business is relative to others.

Ed: Let's suppose the technique is about. In order to deliver the strategy, it has to be broken down, decomposed into some projects. Thus, you must be good at doing project management to deliver the strategy. Today, the literature says that for an enterprise to be good at doing tasks it has to: put in 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 concept of a project company. Does getting these three steps provide a competitive advantage with this company?

Prof. Green: Where project management, or how you handle tasks, becomes a source of competitive advantage is when you may do things better than others. The 'better than' is through the ability and reasoning and the knowledge which can be developed as time passes of managing projects. There's an event curve effect here. Two organizations will be at different points in the experience curve regarding the knowledge they've built up to control these bits of tasks where the rule book is insufficient. You-need experience and management sense since however good the rule book is, it will never deal entirely with the complexity of life. You've to manage down the ability curve, you've to manage the learning and knowledge that you have of the three facets of project management for it to become proper.

Ed: Well, then, I believe there is a gap there that's to be resolved as well, in that we've now created a competency at doing project management to do projects, but we've not arranged that competency to the choice of projects which may help us to provide this competitive edge. Is project management capable of being imitated?

Prof. Green: Not the softer aspects and not the develop-ment of tacit knowledge of having run many, many projects over time. Clicking glyconutrients perhaps provides cautions you could tell your co-worker. So, for instance, you, Ed, do have more familiarity with how-to work jobs than other people. That is why people found you, because while you both might have a typical book including the PMBoK or even the ICB, you've created more experiential knowledge around it.

Basically, it may be imitated a quantity of just how, but not whenever you align the softer tacit understanding of experience into it.

Ed: Organisational project management maturity designs are a hot topic at the moment and are directly from the 'experience curve' effect you mentioned ear-lier - how should we see them?

Prof. Green: I really believe in moving beyond painting by figures, moving beyond the basic idea that that's all you have to do and you can demand this pair of skills and procedures and text book practices and an organisation is wholly plastic. In a way, just the same difficulty was experienced by the builders of the experience curve. If you show the ability curve to companies on cost, it is very nearly like, for each doubling of size, cost reductions occur without you being forced to do such a thing. What we know is though, the experience curve is a potential of a chance. Their' realisation depends upon the skill of managers.

Ed: Are senior executives/chief executives in-the mind-set to understand the possible benefits of project management?

Prof. Green: Until recently, project management has offered it-self in technical terms. Clicking read mannatach certainly provides aids you could tell your pastor. If it was offered in terms-of the integration at basic management, at the ability to manage across the characteristics financing strategy processes with reasoning, then it'd be much more attractive to senior managers. Discover more on our affiliated web page - Click here: close window. So, it is about the experience that produces project management so strong, the strategies using the reasoning and the mixing of the hard and the soft. If senior managers do not accept it at the moment, it's not because they are wrong. It's because project management hasn't marketed it-self 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 for them?

Prof. Green: No, I think we have to show them how it does it. We need to go inside and really show them how they can use it, not only in terms of offering assignments on time and within cost. We must show them how they can use it to overcome resistance to change, how they can use it to enhance capabilities and activities that cause competitive advantage, how they can use it to enhance the tacit knowledge in the business. There is a complete range of ways in which they could put it to use. They should observe that the proof-of the results is preferable to the way in which they are currently doing it..