subject: Projectized Organisations from POME by Gautam Koppala [print this page] The two subsystems where models have more commonly been developed in detail are financing and implementation; that is, the areas traditionally discussed as project management.
For the management of projects, then, a strategic model can be said to exist. But what are the chances of anyone ever implementing it? The key is in changing perceptions; and the keys to effecting that are management and education.
The difficulty with project management is that it can encompass such a broad scope of services in different situations. The project manager for an equipment supply contractor on a power station, say, has a more narrowly defined task than the utility's overall project manager. The project manager for the specification, procurement, and installation of a major telecommunications system has a much broader scope than the project manager of a software development program.
The two strategic questions for enterprises working in project-related industries are to determine:
The level and scope of services that one's clients and customers need and are able to buy.
Whether one has the organizational capability to supply this level and scope of services.
There is little doubt that the most powerful set of ideas relevant to the first questionthe level of servicesis that of total quality. The TQM concept forces one to analyze what services one's clients want. (And there may be several different sets of clients in the production chain ranging from one's boss or bosses to, most obviously, the people who are using the services, whether as customers or as colleagues.) This approach to analyzing the effectiveness of one's services is directly relevant to determining not just the extent to which the factors identifiedare needed, but also the extent to which they need to be organized and delivered in an integrated fashion.
As long ago as 1959, theHarvard Business Review identified integration as the key project management function.The question is, however, what needs to be integrated? By fundamentally addressing the client's real needs and the extent to which these are being satisfactorily met, a project manager may see, for example, that on this project the supply of finance, or the ability to provide better value for money, or to build faster, or to provide greater technical reliability, are issues that need better integration within the scope of project services to be provided.
As the level and scope of services become clearer, the second key strategic question arises: that of the organization's ability to deliver. Here, the principal difficulty is that our educational institutions are so far producing people with either a severely limited number of the vision or the ability to manage such a broad array of issues. For projects to be managed successfully, a wide range of factors may need integrating. Few people have any training across such a broad array, particularly in a project context. Yet there are signs that times are changing, and it is surely very much in the interests of all who work in project-related industries to support such change.
The second evidence of an increasing maturity of project management formation is the growing number of advanced project management educational programs, particularly at the postgraduate level. Postgraduate education is important because a considerable level of technical, organizational, and business integration is being required at senior levels on most of the more advanced projects and programs. Without a well-rounded educational background, as well as real frontline practical experience, there must be some doubt as to our ability to furnish managers capable of meeting the project management demands being made by today's projects. A fundamental task facing any senior manager on a major program or project is to work out how the various factors identifiedshould best be allocated and integrated on his or her project. For managers and educators, a major challenge facing the project management profession is to ensure that we have people with the intellectual breadth and the experience to tackle issues of the diversity and subtlety of those so often posed by today's projects. Every encouragement should be given to the professional societies and the schools and other organizations around the world to develop an appropriate, well-rounded professional formation for the management of projects.
Gautam Koppala,
POME Authot
Projectized Organisations from POME by Gautam Koppala
