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Build the business with powerful project management.

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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Project management is a powerful tool that you can use throughout an organization to boost personal and collaborative productivity and ultimately show triple-digit return on investment. Explore the use of PM throughout the enterprise, and learn to build a standardized system that embeds PM best practices. Project management is the science of getting things done. It's what every organization and individual needs to do to succeed. The problem in most companies is that there is no standard process for PM. According to a February 2003 study by the Center for Business Practices, the largest PM challenge facing companies is implementing a consistent process.

What happens when there is no common process for getting things done in an organization? From lost time to inconsistency, a lack of process means poor performance. Signs of poor performance include lost time, duplication of efforts, lost institutional knowledge, inefficiency, and inconsistency.

A project is any activity in an organization that has a distinct deliverable and a clear beginning and ending. There is an interdependence between processes and projects because organizations are made up of processes (activities that are done repeatedly) and projects (events with a distinct beginning and end). When your projects follow a process, then you achieve greater performance.

As the quality movement showed in the 1990s, the biggest improvements in operational productivity result in addressing process improvement and control of operational processes, both manufacturing and administrative. According to a Standish Group report that reviewed more than 40,000 projects in the past 10 years, when there is not a consistent process for doing PM in a company, companies waste up to 20 percent of all project dollars spent. Beyond dollars, poor PM processes result in schedule delays and lost customers and can cost organizations a competitive advantage when they are late to market.

The power of PM is a competitive tool for your organization that is easy to learn and can be applied with simple Web-based and office automation tools. The performance benefits of a uniform, repeatable approach to PM are achievable for companies of all sizes.

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