Keep Project Management Alive

Project Management Impacted by Falling Economies

Everyone is going through a tough time as European and the U.S. economies are again showing a sign of slow down with fears that they might even further slump down to recession.  As precautionary measures, the businessmen are trying to reduce their operational costs. However, without proper project management training, sometimes their efforts result in penny-wise but pound foolish economy.

Many companies have undertaken projects to save money, but they are doing so without any proper project management in place thus making a serious mistake at the very beginning. Without hiring proper management expertise, these companies are trying to cut cost by all means, including team size reduction and outsourcing. Some of them even have designed projects to phase out the entire IT department. Without additional management expertise, the projects are being handed over to those who barely know the project management basics or the internal project management staff is being overburdened.
Effective resource management can certainly save these companies money. A good project manager will have foresight, he will see issues before conflict sets in, and he might bring solutions to problems before they become terribly serious.  A good project manager will plan accordingly to manage the input and output of various subsystems so that the project is harmoniously carried out without any waste of resources in waiting for a given subsystem to be finished before project may continue.

Many times, there is an incorrect perception about project management expertise – that folks with these skills are just an unnecessary burden on the company. The reason for this is that it’s very difficult to motivate executives to understand  how foresight and planning avoided a particular problem, as senior management might think that it never ever was a threat in reality.

Under the conventional management approach, projects are considered independent units and their success and failure depends upon the metrics with financial ratios. But under an improved approach, projects are considered as part of whole business strategy and not mere isolated independent entities. Though this sounds very simple, yet still a good framework or effective mode of action has to be evolved under this approach.

By reducing project management training, the companies are themselves are inviting problems like delay and associated escalation in cost. Companies fail to realize that the delays in project implementation will cost them more than savings made by reducing project manager costs.

The new organizational approach should evolve new metrics and charts to evaluate the projects. Business strategy should be flexible enough to allow variations in budget or schedules so that the project is bound to deliver benefits to the organization. If projects are not aligned to business strategy, they can not operate in functional areas. So the entire project management expertise should come forward to take strategic responsibility and deliver results not only at the end of the project but even during the project implementation as well.

Advertisement