As our PMO Squad partner Joe Pusz explains in this article, having good project management in your company gives you a great advantage over your competitors.
Competitive advantages are conditions that allow a company to produce a service of equal value at a lower price. These conditions allow the productive entity to generate more sales or higher margins than its competitors in the market. Competitive advantages are attributed to a variety of factors including cost structure, brand, product offer quality, distribution network, intellectual property and customer service.
So how to integrate project management with your own organization. Think about how many projects are being carried out. Tens, hundreds or even thousands of projects a year, depending on the size of the organization. And how successful those projects are, because as far as we know from PMI reports, every year only about 50% of the projects end on schedule, end within budget or within the defined scope. Also, about 10% of project budgets are wasted because of poor performance. This figure is considered low because of all the informal projects that are executed by Project Managers and for which no information is reported.
If an organization has an average project execution performance, then only 50% of the projects will be successful. What if it could be improved to 75-25 or 90-10? We know that the competition also averages 50-50 project success. If you can increase the project success rate to 75% or 90%, you build a competitive advantage. Producing products or services more efficiently, faster and cheaper than the competition.
Too much time is spent in this sector exploring the disadvantages of project management rather than focusing on how to use project management to gain a competitive advantage. You need to understand how to motivate people to deliver results rather than focus on project governance, checklists and process audits.
The author of the article believes that Project Management leaders need to understand the purpose of Project Management within organizations. Starting with why. And once the purpose has been identified then build the HOW and WHAT to be able to achieve the purpose and gain the necessary competitive advantage.
