Publication: SAM Advanced Management Journal
Publication Date: 01-JAN-07
Delivery: Immediate Online Access
Author: Brown, Chris J.
Article Excerpt
Successful project management can greatly enhance an organization's chances of developing and sustaining a competitive edge over rivals. However, project management does not exist in a vacuum and cannot be summoned into existence when needed unless the ground has been prepared. The organization needs a culture that supports project management, embedded in its way of doing business. Managers need to be aware of the dimensions that do or do not support such a culture, especially sociability and solidarity, and should analyze type of culture they now have--networked, mercenary, fragmented, communal. A study of 718 project managers in South Africa sheds light on the essential elements of success.
Objectives and Methodology
This paper intends to create awareness that project management is eminently suitable to implement new ventures, expansions, or changes in an organization that are essential for sustaining an organization's competitive edge. The hypothesis is that project management, based on its inherent properties is a major contributor to sustaining an organization's competitive edge. The organization, in turn, must develop its project management capacity as a distinctive competency, which requires developing and inculcating an organizational culture that supports project management.
A literature study established the relationships between competitive edge, strategy, and project management. Another literature study established the concepts of organizational culture generically. Thereafter, the author attempted to identify the dimensions of a project management supporting organizational culture by combining, comparing, and drawing inferences from the authoritative research by Goffee and Jones (1996), Van der Post (1996), the author's own empirical survey (2000), and Morrison (2005).
Defining Competitive Edge
Adapted from the works of Kenny (2005), Render and Heizer (1997), and Porter (1980), as quoted by Render and Heizer (1997), competitive edge can be interpreted as supplying goods and services that are better or at least different, or cheaper, or doing so faster than rivals can. In a competitive society, achieving and maintaining such an edge implies constant vigilance and the ability to react to changes swiftly. It also implies continuously searching for ways to bring new ideas to market faster and more efficiently, or, alternatively, trying to catch up with the forerunners faster and more efficiently. Clearly such actions are subject to budgetary constraints, the products' or services' forecasted windows of opportunity, and their competitive advantage profiles relative to their rival products or services (Kenny, 2005).
To be successful, organizations must understand their customers' changing wants and needs, what their rivals are capable of and the competitive advantage profiles of their own products. Most important, they should also have effective strategies to mobilize resources organization-wide with flexibility to use them in (Cleland, 1990), to effect required changes faster and more efficiently than competitors.
One such strategy is the application of project management, which over the last three decades has become the prime methodology for capturing new opportunities and bringing about organizational changes (Reiss, 1992), fast and efficient, in a focused and structured way (Cleland, 1990; Kezsbom and Edward, 2001). This prepares the organization for its future (Cleland, 1990). However, most organizations soon discover that such aims must be accompanied by serious efforts to develop project management capacity into a distinctive competency, which means sustaining the competitive edge of their project management capacity compared with that of rivals, according to Porter (1980) as quoted by Render and Heizer (1997).
Defining Project Management
A project can be defined as "that ad-hoc set of activities with logical relationships that is executed by a specific team to achieve a one-off, specified goal within planned performance, time and cost targets" (Brown, 2004). Project management can be defined as "the set of management techniques applied, to enable the integrated management of the performance, time, cost and human relations frameworks pertaining to a project to achieve the goal(s) of the project" (Brown, 2004). Relating to these definitions, the management of a project can generically be reduced to answering the questions, What is to be produced, Who will do the work and with what resources, How much time do we need, and How much money do we need?
The project way of management has the following four foundations, all of which influence the way project management is conducted and which could provide pointers to the dimensions of a culture that supports project management.
1. The first foundation is a systems approach to management (Kerzner, 1992). A system is something that can be broken down into elements with logical relationships between them. The implication of equating a project to a system is that it can be dissected into recognizable parts during planning and the parts can be synthesized to the whole during execution in a logical and structured way. This can also be utilized to identify the inputs of the various service suppliers as well as their interdependencies.
2. Successful project execution depends entirely on thorough preplanning and measures to keep to the planned courses of action (Reiss, 1992). Without thorough preplanning, a project's targets of time and cost cannot be linked to its deliverables. Also, the inputs of service suppliers and the relationships between them cannot be determined
3. The scope, cost, and duration of a project are interdependent and must be managed together (Kezsbom and Edward, 2001; Frigenti and Comninos, 2002). This means that none of these three project parameters can be changed unless the effects of such a change on the other two are first established and considered. Failure to do this can cause serious disruptions in the relationships within a project.
4. Project management is a derivative of the matrix approach to organization, which embodies a transfunctional organizational structure (Kerzner, 1992; Kezsbom and Edward, 2001). The transfunctional characteristic typical of most sizable projects implies that they cut horizontally over various domains of functional managers. The organizational culture to support this must be attended to very carefully. The reason is that the pure functionally oriented structure and organizational culture invariably shifts to a hybrid structure with both functional and transfunctional elements, requiring a different culture, when project management becomes embedded in an...
NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.
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