PMI_TW電子報第三期_專欄文章

The Value of Project Management

Many brand-new PMPRs at Taiwan are enthusiastic about promoting project management in their company. But much to their disappointment, they often lacked support from their top management and were swamped by their colleague’s complaints, such as too many documents, too often meetings, daunting procedures, and, no time to do work, etc. After a while, their enthusiasm was dissipated and the project management implementation initiative just disappeared like ripples in a pond. Is there any solution to solve this problem? In my perspective, to communicate clearly the value of project management is the crucial point. Value does matter “Values are the basic convictions that a specific mode of conduct or end-state of existence is personally or socially preferable to an opposite or converse mode of conduct or end-state of existence. They contain a judgmental element in that they carry an individual’s ideas as to what is right, good, or desirable. Values tend to be relatively stable and enduring” According to the above quotation from the popular organization behavior textbook written by Robbins and Judge, we can infer that once the value of project management was established in an organization, the top management will consider the institutionalization of project management is right and they will commit the company resources to the implementation of project management for long rather than an impromptu as filed in various lessons learned. We can also infer that the project managers will recognize that running projects using the project management methodology is the norm rather than exception, and proper documents, meetings and procedures are necessary for the benefits of both projects and the company in the long run, and most importantly, they will persevere at running project with project management disciplines no matter how hard the environment is. By the same argument, the project team members will deem that following the project management procedures is what they should do, and appreciate that disciplined project management can help them do right things from the right start, avoid unnecessary rework and overtime, and they will cooperate with the project managers from their heart. The cognition gap Though we, project management practitioners, consider the value of project management is so apparent that there is no need to overemphasize it, a popular textbook written by Hill and Jones on strategy management doesn’t even mention the word “project management” once in the sections about “value chain”2. They clearly state the value creation roles of primary activities (research and development, production, marketing and sales, and, service) and support activities (company infrastructure, human resources, and, materials management). The above mentioned fact has a great influence on the cognition of the value of project management by top management. Because this textbook is used by many MBA programs, many top managers learned strategy management just from here. They had no idea about the value of project management, because the textbook doesn’t mention that there is any role played by project management in the value creation process of a company. All the project management practitioners know that projects are the main instruments in the company to integrate all these primary activities and support activities to produce products, services and results which are beneficial to the company stakeholders. Without projects most of the promises to the company stakeholders will be hard to be realized. This is the reason why we need to communicate the value of project management to the top managers. The environment here is even worse here than developed western countries. The companies at Taiwan are mostly medium to small size, and, are owned and run by family—the boss is the law. If we cannot convince the boss the value of project management, the promotion of project management is just like fighting a campaign without any hope of success. Numbers tell According to the survey (with 1,867 respondents) by Tomas et al3, they captured the following insights into the value placed on project management in today's organizations: 82% agree that project management is used to increase the likelihood of delivering successful projects While 60% agree, "projects are usually aligned with my company's strategic plans," 60% disagree that projects within their company are usually completed on schedule or on budget. 73% agree that project management enhances customer satisfaction 71% agree that project management enhances their firm's performance in non-financial ways. If the above figures are not convincing enough, the Center for Business Practices (CBP), the research arm of PM Solutions, has conducted industry-wide studies using a balanced family of measures that document the value of project management to organizations4. In those studies, 97% of the respondents say project management adds value to their organizations. By implementing project management improvement initiatives, organizations have on average returned the following value: What we should do next It can be expected that there are still some antagonists claiming the above data are not convincing because of the difference between cultures and environments. Truly, much of the quantitative data about the value of project management we can show now are from developed western countries, which are much more mature on project management than us. I suggest that PMI Taiwan chapter continuously sponsors graduate student research programs surveying Taiwanese companies on the value of project management, contrasting with western countries, and observing the trends. After a few years, we will have solid local data base to convince anyone the value of project management on Taiwanese companies and to obtain their commitment to implement it. Robbins, S. P. and Judge, T. A., Organizational Behavior, 12th Ed., Pearson Education Inc., Upper Saddle River, New Jersey, 2007, pp. 108-109. Hill, C. W. L. and Jones, G. R., Strategic Management: An integrated Approach, 4th Ed., Houghton Mifflin Company, New York, 1998, pp. 119-123. Thomas, J., Delisle, C. L. and Jugdev, K., Selling Project Management to Senior Executives: Framing the Moves that Matter, Project Management Institute, 2002. “The Value of Project Management: Validating the positive impacts of project management on organizations,” PM Solutions White Paper Series, Project Management Solutions, Inc., 2002.