JOBS IN MURFREESBORO

Prof. Green: Well, I suppose that comes back to this issue of the difference between the type of projects that are chosen and the way you manage the projects. Obviously choosing the type of projects depends on being able to link and prioritise projects according to an understanding of what the capability of an organisation is relative to others.

Ed: Let us assume that the strategy is set. In order to deliver the strategy, it has to be broken down, decomposed into a series of projects. Therefore, you need to be good at doing project management to deliver the strategy. Now, the literature says that for an organisation to be good at doing projects it has to: put in 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 integrated way using the concept of a project office. Does taking those three steps deliver a competitive advantage for this organisation?

1. Prof. Green: Where project management, or how you manage projects, becomes a source of competitive advantage is when you can do things better than others. The 'better than' is through the experience and judgement and the knowledge which is built up over time of managing projects. There is an experience curve effect here. Two organisations will be at different points in the experience curve as to the knowledge they have built up to manage those bits of projects where the rule book is inadequate. You need management judgement and experience because however good the rule book is, it will never deal completely with the complexity of life. You have to manage down the experience curve, you have to manage the learning and knowledge that you have of those three aspects of project management for it to become strategic.
2. Ed: Well, then, I think there is 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 haven't aligned that competency to the selection of projects which will help us to give this competitive advantage. Is project management capable of being imitated? Prof. Green: Not the softer aspects and not the development of tacit knowledge of having run many, many projects over time. So, for example, you, Ed, have more knowledge of how to run projects than other people. That's why people came to you, because while you both may have a standard book such as the PMBoK or the ICB, you have developed more experiential knowledge around it.

In essence, it can be imitated a certain amount of the way, but not when you align the softer tacit knowledge of experience into it. Ed: Organisational project management maturity models are a hot topic at the moment and are closely linked to the 'experience curve' effect you mentioned earlier - how should we view them?

Prof. Green: I believe in moving beyond painting by numbers, moving beyond the simplistic idea that an organisation is completely plastic and you can impose this set of procedures and skills and text book protocols and that's all you need to do. In a way, exactly the same problem was experienced by the developers of the experience curve. If you show companies the experience curve on cost, it's almost as though, for every doubling of volume, cost reductions occur without you having to do anything. What we know is though, that the experience curve is a potential of a possibility. Its' realisation depends on the skill of managers.

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