Strategic Project Management A Competitive Edge

Recently, a number of the world's leading project management firms took important initiatives to show executive management regarding the strategic value and benefits of project management. The focus is to move from specific project management to organisational project management, which these organisations maintain is a strategic advantage in a competitive economy.

In this article, Ed Naughton, Director-general of the Institute of Project Management and current IPMA Vice-president, requires Professor Sebastian Green, Dean of the Faculty of Commerce and Professor of Management and Marketing at University College Cork (previously of the London Business School), about his views of strategic project management as a car for competitive advantage.

Ed: What does one point proper Project Management is?

Prof. Green: Strategic project management is the management of the projects that are of crucial importance to help the operation as a whole to own competitive advantage.

Ed: And what becomes a competitive advantage, then?

Prof. Green: There are three features of having a core competence. The three attributes are: it gives value to customers; it's maybe not easily imitated; it opens up new opportunities in the future.

Ed: But how can challenge management deliver a competitive advantage?

Prof. Green: You can find two elements to project management. Going To open in a new browser possibly provides warnings you should tell your uncle. One factor is the actual choice of the sort of projects that the company partcipates in, and subsequently there is implementation, how a projects themselves are managed.

Ed: Competitive advantage - the importance of selecting the projects - it is not easy to establish which projects must be chosen!

Prof. Green: I think that the selection and prioritisation of projects is something that has not been done well within the project management literature because it's basically been assumed away through reducing it to financial analysis. The strategic imperative gives you an alternative way of prioritising projects as it is saying that some projects might not be as successful as others, but when they add to our expertise relative to others, then that is going to be important.

Therefore, to just take an illustration, if a company's competitive advantage is introducing services more quickly than the others, drugs, let us say, finding product to market more quickly, then your projects that allow it to acquire the product more quickly to market will function as the most significant ones, even if within their own terms, they don't have higher productivity than some other projects.

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

Prof. Green: Absolutely. The organisation must know which actions it is employed in, which are the critical ones for it competitive advantage and then, that drives the selection of projects. Companies are not great at doing that and they could not even know what those activities are. They will believe it is every thing they do because of the energy system.

Ed: If an organization formulates its strategy, then what the project management group says is that project management will be the method for providing that strategy. Then, when the company is good at doing project management, does it have any strategic advantage?

Prof. Learn more on mannatech by browsing our tasteful web page. Green: Well, perhaps that returns to this problem 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 having the ability to link and prioritise projects ac-cording to a knowledge of what the capacity of a business is relative to others.

Ed: Let us assume the strategy is placed. In order to provide the strategy, it's to be broken down, decomposed into a series of tasks. Thus, you have to be proficient at doing project management to deliver the strategy. Today, the literature says that for an enterprise to become good at doing projects it has 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 office. Does taking those three steps offer a competitive advantage because of this operation?

Prof. Green: Where project management, or how you handle tasks, becomes a source of competitive advantage is when you may do things a lot better than others. The 'a lot better than' is through the experience and reasoning and the information that is accumulated over time of managing projects. There is an event curve effect here. Two enterprises will soon be at various points in the experience curve regarding the information they have built-up to manage those components of projects where the rule book is inadequate. You need experience and management sense since however good the rule book is, it will never deal completely 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 areas of project management because of it to become ideal. Get more on our affiliated article directory - Click here: what is mannatech company.

Ed: Well, then, I believe there is a niche there that's to be resolved as well, in that we've now produced a competency at doing project management to do projects, but we have not aligned that competency to the choice of projects which will help us to give this competitive advantage. Is project management capable of being copied?

Prof. Green: Not the softer elements and not the devel-opment of tacit knowledge of having run many, many projects with time. So, for example, 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 typical book like the PMBoK or the ICB, you've created more experiential knowledge around it.

Essentially, it may be copied a certain amount of the way, but not whenever you align the softer tacit understanding of experience into it. If you think you know anything, you will probably wish to learn about small blue arrow.

Ed: Organisational project management maturity styles are a hot topic at the moment and are closely linked to the 'experience curve' effect you mentioned ear-lier - how should we view them?

Prof. Green: in my opinion in moving beyond painting by numbers, moving beyond the idea that a business is completely plastic and you can encourage this group of capabilities and methods and text book standards and that is all you have to do. In a way, exactly the same difficulty was experienced by the developers of the experience curve. If you show organizations the ability curve on cost, it's almost as though, for each and every doubling of volume, cost reductions occur without you being forced to do anything. What we all know is though, that the experience curve is a potential of the chance. Their' realisation depends upon the skill of administrators.

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

Prof. Green: Until lately, project management has promoted itself in technical terms. Then it'd be more attractive to senior executives, if it was offered in terms-of the integration at standard management, at the ability to manage throughout the features financing strategy processes with sense. So, it is about the mixing of the soft and the hard, the methods with the sense and the knowledge which makes project management so effective. If senior managers do not embrace it right now, it is not as they are wrong. It's because project management has not sold it self as effortlessly as it should've done.

Ed: Do we have to sell to senior executives and chief executives that it will produce competitive advantage for them?

Prof. Green: No, I do believe we have to show them how it does it. We have to go in there and actually show them how they can use it, not only with regards to providing tasks on time and within cost. We have to show them how they can use it to overcome organisational resistance to change, how they can use it to enhance capabilities and actions that lead to competitive edge, how they can use it to enhance the tacit knowledge in the organisation. There's a whole array of ways they could use it. They have to observe that the evidence of the end result is preferable to the way they're currently doing it..