Recently, a number of the world's major project management organizations have taken major initiatives to show executive management regarding the strategic value and advantages of project management. The emphasis is to move from individual project management to organisational project management, which these firms preserve 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, asks 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 vehicle for competitive advantage. Buy Asea Sex Com contains more concerning the inner workings of this thing.

Ed: What do you thing ideal Project Management is?

Prof. Green: Strategic project management may be the management of the tasks which are of critical importance to enable the company in general to get competitive advantage.

Ed: And what defines a competitive advantage, then?

Prof. Green: There are three features of getting a core competence. The three characteristics are: it adds value to customers; it's maybe not simply imitated; it opens up new opportunities in the future.

Ed: But how do project administration deliver a competitive advantage?

Prof. Green: There are two factors to project management. One element is the actual choice of the kind of projects that the business engages in, and secondly there is implementation, how a projects themselves are handled.

Ed: Competitive advantage - the value of selecting the correct projects - it's challenging to determine which projects ought to be chosen!

Prof. Green: I believe that the selection 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 economic analysis. The strategic imperative gives you an alternative way of prioritising projects since it is saying that some projects might not be as successful as others, but if they add to our expertise relative to others, then that is going to be important.

Therefore, to simply take an example, if a company's competitive advantage is introducing services more quickly than the others, pharmaceuticals, let's say, finding product to market more quickly, then the projects that allow it to acquire the product more quickly to market will be the most significant types, even if in their own terms, they don't have higher profitability than some other projects.

Ed: But if we are going to select our projects, we've to establish what are the details or metrics we're going to select them against giving us the competitive advantage.

Prof. Green: Positively. The business has to know which actions it is involved in, which are the critical ones for it competitive advantage and then, that drives the selection of projects. Companies aren't very good at doing that and they could not even know what those actions are. They'll think it is anything they do due to the energy system.

Ed: If an organization formulates its strategy, then what the project management community says is that project management could be the method for delivering that strategy. So therefore, when the organisation is good at doing project management, is there any strategic advantage?

Prof. Green: Well, I guess that returns to this problem of the difference between the type of projects that are selected and the way you manage the projects. Obviously choosing the sort of projects depends upon having the ability to link and prioritise projects ac-cording to a knowledge of what the capability of a business is relative to others.

Ed: Let's suppose that the strategy is defined. So that you can produce the strategy, it's to be divided, decomposed into a series of projects. Therefore, you must be proficient at doing project management to supply the strategy. This majestic mannatech website has limitless pushing tips for the inner workings of it. Now, the literature says that for a business to be proficient at doing projects it has to: devote project management procedures, train people on how to apply/do project management and co-ordinate the efforts of the people trained to work to procedures in and built-in way utilizing the concept of a project company. Does getting those three measures produce a competitive advantage for this business?

Prof. Green: Where project management, or how you manage tasks, becomes a source of competitive advantage is when you may do things better than the others. Dig up further on our favorite partner article directory - Visit this URL: official site. The 'better-than' is through the experience and reasoning and the information which is built-up as time passes of managing projects. There is an experience curve effect here. I learned about powered by by searching books in the library. As to the knowledge they've built up to control these components of jobs where the rule book is inadequate two firms will soon be at different points in the experience curve. You need management judgement and knowledge because however good the rule book is, it'll never deal fully with the complexity of life. You have to manage down the ability curve, you've to manage the understanding and learning that you have of those three aspects of project management for it to become strategic.

Ed: Well, then, I think there's a gap there that has to be addressed as well, in that we have now developed a competency at doing project management to do projects, but we've not aligned that competency to the choice of projects which can help us to provide this competitive advantage. Is project management able to being copied?

Prof. Green: Not the softer aspects and not the devel-opment of tacit knowledge of having run many, many jobs with time. Therefore, as an example, you, Ed, do have more understanding of how-to run jobs than others. That is why people found you, since while you both may have a typical book such as the PMBoK or even the ICB, you have produced more experiential knowledge around it.

Basically, it can be copied a specific amount of the way in which, although not when you align the smoother tacit knowledge of knowledge into it.

Ed: Organisational project management maturity types are a hot topic at the moment and are directly linked to the 'experience curve' effect you mentioned earlier - how should we see them?

Prof. Green: I really believe in moving beyond painting by quantities, moving beyond the idea that an organisation is totally plastic and you may demand this group of capabilities and processes and text book protocols and that's all you have to do. In a way, just the same difficulty was experienced by the designers of the experience curve. It is nearly like, for every doubling of volume, cost savings occur without you being forced to do any such thing, if you show the ability curve to organizations on cost. What we know is however, the experience curve is a potential of a chance. Its' realisation depends on the ability of managers.

Ed: Are senior executives/chief executives in the attitude to appreciate the potential advantages of project management?

Prof. Green: Until lately, project management has offered it self in technical terms. If it was offered in terms of the integration at basic management, at the power to manage over the features financing method techniques with judgement, then it would be much more appealing to senior executives. So, it's about the blending of the smooth and the difficult, the methods using the reasoning and the experience that makes project management so powerful. If senior managers don't embrace it at the moment, it is perhaps not because they're wrong. It is because project management has not sold it self as efficiently as it should've done.

Ed: Do we need to offer to chief executives and senior executives that it will deliver competitive advantage to them?

Prof. Green: No, I think we need to demonstrate to them how it does it. We have to get in there and actually show them how they are able to put it to use, not only with regards to offering jobs on time and within cost. We have to show them how they can use it to over come 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 company. There's a whole array of ways in which they are able to utilize it. They should observe that the evidence of the outcome is better than just how they're currently doing it..