Recently, a number of the world's major project management organisations have taken major initiatives to show government management in regards to the strategic importance and advantages of project management. The emphasis is to move from individual project management to organisational project management, which these organisations preserve 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 proper project management as a vehicle for competitive advantage.

Ed: What does one point ideal Project Management is?

Prof. Green: Strategic project management may be the management of those jobs which are of crucial importance to help the enterprise in general to get competitive advantage.

Ed: And what defines a competitive advantage, then?

Prof. Green: You can find three characteristics of experiencing a core competence. The three attributes are: it adds value to customers; it's perhaps not easily imitated; it opens up new possibilities in the future.

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

Prof. Green: You can find two factors to project management. One element is the actual selection of the kind of projects that the business engages in, and secondly there's execution, how a projects themselves are maintained.

Ed: Competitive advantage - the importance of selecting the correct projects - it is difficult to establish which projects must be selected!

Prof. Green: I think that the choice and prioritisation of tasks is something that has not been done well within the project management literature because it's essentially been assumed away through reducing it to financial analysis. The strategic imperative gives you a different way of prioritising projects since it is saying that some projects might not be as successful as others, but when they add to our proficiency 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 the projects that allow it to acquire the product more quickly to market will function as the most critical ones, even if within their own terms, they don't have higher productivity than some other projects. This elegant high quality glyconutrient wiki has a pile of commanding suggestions for the reason for this concept.

Ed: But if we are going to select our projects, we've to establish what're the guidelines or measurements we are going to select them against that give the competitive edge to us.

Prof. Green: Completely. The organisation needs to know which actions it is involved in, which are the critical ones for it competitive advantage and then, that drives the choice of projects. Organisations aren't very good at doing that and they might not even understand what those activities are. They'll believe it is everything they do because of the energy system.

Ed: If an organization formulates its strategy, then what the project management community says is that project management may be the channel for delivering that strategy. So therefore, when the business is good at doing project management, does it have any strategic advantage?

Prof. Green: Well, perhaps that comes back to this matter of the difference between the form of projects that are selected and the way you manage the projects. Obviously choosing the kind of projects depends upon having the ability to link and prioritise projects according to a knowledge of what the capacity of an organisation is relative to others.

Ed: Let's suppose the strategy is about. So that you can produce the strategy, it has to be broken-down, decomposed into a number of projects. For that reason, you must be proficient at doing project management to deliver the strategy. Now, the literature says that for an organisation to be good at doing tasks it's to: devote 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 using the notion of a project company. Does using those three ways produce a competitive advantage for this enterprise?

Prof. Green: Where project management, or how you manage jobs, becomes a source of competitive advantage is when you can do things better than the others. The 'a lot better than' is through the experience and thinking and the data which will be developed as time passes of managing projects. There is an experience curve effect here. Two organizations will be at different points in the experience curve regarding information they've built up where the rule book is inadequate to handle these items of tasks. Get more on by going to our stirring encyclopedia. You need management sense and experience because however good the rule book is, it'll never deal fully with all the complexity of life. You've to manage down the ability curve, you've to manage the learning and knowledge that you've of those three facets of project management for it to become ideal.

Ed: Well, then, I do believe there's a niche there that's to be addressed 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 can help us to provide this competitive advantage. Is project management able to being copied?

Prof. Green: Not the softer features and not the devel-opment of tacit knowledge of having run many, many jobs over-time. So, for example, you, Ed, have significantly more familiarity with how to work jobs than others. That is why people came to you, because while you both might have a typical book like the PMBoK or even the ICB, you have produced more experiential knowledge around it.

In essence, it could be imitated a quantity of the way, however not whenever you arrange the smoother tacit understanding of knowledge into it.

Ed: Organisational project management maturity types are a hot topic at this time and are closely linked to the 'experience curve' effect you mentioned earlier in the day - how should we view them?

Prof. Green: in my opinion in moving beyond painting by figures, moving beyond the idea that that is all you need to do and you can encourage this set of processes and capabilities and text book methods and a company is totally plastic. I discovered compare asea water by searching books in the library. In a way, just the same difficulty was experienced by the builders of the ability curve. If you show companies the experience curve on cost, it is very nearly as though, for every single doubling of volume, cost savings occur without you having to do any such thing. This disturbing read about asea redox URL has various majestic aids for why to do it. What we realize is nevertheless, the experience curve is a potential of the risk. Their' realisation depends on the ability of professionals.

Ed: Are senior executives/chief executives within the attitude to understand the possible advantages of project management?

Prof. Green: Until recently, project management has promoted it self in technical terms. If it was offered in terms of the integration at general management, at the power to manage across the features lending technique methods with judgement, then it would be much more attractive to senior managers. So, it is about the ability that produces project management so powerful, the practices together with the sense and the mixing of the difficult and the soft. If senior managers don't accept it at this time, it's perhaps not since they are wrong. It is 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 deliver competitive advantage for them?

Prof. Green: No, I think we have to show them how it does it. We have to get inside and actually show them how they can use it, not only in terms of offering tasks 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 actions that lead to competitive advantage, how they can use it to enhance the tacit knowledge in the company. There is an entire array of ways in which they can use it. They have to note that the proof of the results is preferable to the way in which they are currently doing it..