July 29, 2005

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Enterprise Project Management A Core Business Competency

Seattle, WA, USA--(Jobwerx News)--Is project management a core business function throughout your organization?

In today's global market, companies, regardless of industry and size, are looking to improve their systems and processes to become more competitive.

One way they are attempting to do this is by establishing project management as a core competency throughout the organization. By setting up standardized procedures within the company, they hope to learn from past mistakes, make processes more efficient and develop people’s skills and talents to function more effectively. The list of organizations attempting to integrate project management disciplines and best practices into the way they manage their businesses is expanding daily; however, the number of those who have succeeded in doing so is significantly smaller.

The answer for many of these companies is positioning. By “positioning”, the group charged with the implementation of project management and best practices is positioned at the uppermost levels of management. It is critical that all levels of workers in the organization, including line managers, see that the executive level supports project management as a business function without hesitation, publicly and completely. Without support from the top, the effort to inculcate project management won’t get off the ground.

Typically, the group charged with the responsibility to get the project management system up and running is called a Project Office or Project Management Center of Excellence (PMCoE) or Corporate Project Management Office (CPMO). The name isn’t nearly as important as its position. Positioning is a critical aspect of establishing project management as an enterprise-wide core competency. It must first be viewed and treated as a key business function throughout the organization. This recognition is the first critical step toward successfully institutionalizing project management best practices as a core competency. Not taking this first step will result in not achieving the goal of establishing project management enterprise-wide as a business function because the PMCoE will not have the requisite authority and autonomy required to get the job done.

The number of companies who are creating PMOs grows daily. The numerous articles written about PMOs and the number of companies sending representatives to seminars and classes to learn about PMOs attest to the continued popularity of this concept. For those who are embarking down this road, establishing a PMO is not a trivial pursuit and it requires real dedication and commitment to see the process through to the end. Establishing PMOs is the right thing to do because the driving forces behind creating them are not going to go away, and project management is the best answer to responding to them but, more importantly, project management is a core business function for most companies.

Positioning the project management function at the highest management levels within the organization provides the measure of autonomy necessary to extend its authority across the organization while substantiating the value and importance the function has in the eyes of executive management. Establishing project management centers of excellence should not be viewed as a quick-fix solution but, rather, as a long-term foundation-building effort.

Competing globally, increasing market share, reducing costs and improving profits—all in the pursuit of producing better products and services faster through the use of high technology solutions—are just a few of the reasons why most organizations seek better ways to improve time-to-market, cost-to-market and quality-to-market numbers.

The effective use of project management techniques is becoming more widely recognized as an effective approach for achieving improvements in these areas. Some firms even view project management as a key weapon in their arsenal to increase customer satisfaction and beat the competition. The organization as a whole must recognize and adopt new attitudes that embrace project management best practices as the normal way of working. This enables them to bring the full power of this new competitive weapon to bear in the battle of continued business growth and, in many cases, ultimate survival in today’s highly competitive global market.

“Enterprise-wide project management is an idea whose time has come. Applying project management on a broader basis within the organization adds speed and productivity to ongoing processes,” states Paul C. Dinsmore, an international author and speaker on the subject of enterprise project management.

Determining the current conditions is required on any project that involves introducing a change that will impact people across the organization, especially if it affects the way they do their work. Clearly documenting the current conditions to establish a baseline against which improvements can be measured is essential to having the capability to quantitatively demonstrate the added value of project management and to institutionalize project management as a core competency and, thus, achieve the highest level of project management maturity.

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Conributions by Dennis Bolles, PMP, President, DLB Associates, LLC courtesy of American Management Association

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