Hexagon of Excellence
Companies’ approach to project management in terms of methodology, decision-making, and strategy progresses over time. The level of progress companies can achieve in relation to their approach to project management determines their level of performance and consequently their excellence. According to Kerzner (2019), adopting a singular methodology instead of multiple methodologies for projects helps achieve synergy and process control. Ibrahim & Kocabas (2010) also recognize that combining corporate methodologies into a singular methodology creates synergistic effects that make the project management process easier to control. Bouer & Carvalho (2005) argue that a company’s adoption of a singular methodology is a vital sign of its maturity when it comes to project management. The adoption of this methodology shows an organization’s total commitment to project management. The characteristics within this approach to project management help improve companies’ performances. These characteristics include training and education, integrated processes, and behavioral excellence (Bolat, Kusdemir, Uslu & Temur, 2017).
In this approach to project management, resources are spent to ensure training and education of skills for the organization’s employees. It is often seen as an investment in the employees. Kerzner (2019) recognizes that training and education of skills have numerous benefits for an organization. The benefits can be measured both quantitatively as well as qualitatively. According to Kerzner (2019), the quantitative benefits include faster decision-making that is of high quality, reduces the turnover of personnel, lowers the organization’s costs, reduces paperwork, shortens the product development time cycle, improves the quality and reliability of personnel, and ensures quicker implementation of practices that have proven to be efficient and effective to the organization. Ultimately, this leads to higher profit margins. The qualitative benefits achieved by investing in training and education of personnel include higher morale amongst staff and improved control of the organization and its operations. Apart from that, training and education also improves customer relations, improved visibility and focus on results, fewer conflicts by staff that require the intervention of senior management, faster development of managers, better coordination in the various departments, and better support from the functional areas within the organization. It is important to note that these benefits can be achieved much faster through proper training and education. As such, the training should not consist of a few random courses (Kerzner, 2019). Instead, the curriculum should be able to improve both the basic and advanced skills of a project manager.
According to Kerzner (2019), companies that have multiple processes in place are usually immature in project management. As such, once an organization understands the advantages of adopting a singular methodology, the first two processes that ought to be integrated are total quality management (TQM) and project management. The singular methodology is complete once concurrent engineering is integrated into TQM and project management. This is further by including change management and risk management. The overall effect of integrating all these business aspects is that it leads to organizational effectiveness and efficiency.
According to Bolat et al (2017), behavioral excellence ought to start by recognizing the differences between line management and project management. It is also important to consider that to support sustained project management growth, there needs to be a completely different set of training courses. In behavioral excellence, a lot of emphases is placed on creating outstanding project management leaders, the characteristics of productive teams, motivation in project management, the characteristics of a productive organization, and sound and effective project management. It is important to note that the behavioral excellence score in organizations is increased by the success of project managers in organizations and positive behaviors that are reliable (Bolat et al, 2017).
Erceg & Gulam (2018), argue that traditionally, project management started with the assumption that proposed projects in an organization were in line with its strategic goals and contributed to the attainment of the organization’s goals and objectives. However, it is important to realize that various projects support an organization’s strategic goals in varying degrees. In fact, some projects do not support the organization’s goals at all. As such, it is important to first define and evaluate a project’s benefits in order to align the organization’s short and long-term goals to the efforts and resources put towards the accomplishment of the project (Erceg & Gulam, 2018). Therefore, projects should be chosen and ranked according to an organization’s strategy. According to Yousef Al Sabaa (2009), there are four stages involved in maintaining the strategic alignment of projects in an organization. First, there ought to be a clear strategy that focuses on achieving the long-term objectives of the organization. Second, the strategies ought to be communicated among the employees. This ensures the dissemination of critical information to the different departments within the organization hence ensuring the employees know their role in achieving the organization’s objectives. Third, the organization should form a plan that links their plans, budgets, and projects to their strategies. Finally, they should implement the strategies and gather feedback on their progress. This will ensure that the organization’s strategies are executed with the sole purpose of supporting business objectives. The feedback should also be used to correct the organization’s directions in case of any deviations from the set targets.
References
Kerzner, H. (2019). Level 3: Singular Methodology. Using the Project Management Maturity Model, Third Edition, 75–95. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119559078.ch7
Bouer, R., & Carvalho, M. M. de. (2005). Project management maturity: just a singular methodology is enough? Production, 15(3), 347–361. https://doi.org/10.1590/s0103-65132005000300006
Demir, C., & Kocabaş, İ. (2010). Project Management Maturity Model (PMMM) in educational organizations. Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences, 9, 1641–1645. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2010.12.379
Bolat, B., Kuşdemir, A., Uslu, İ. C., & Temur, G. T. (2017). An Assessment for IT Project Maturity Levels. International Journal of Information Technology Project Management, 8(2), 1–16. https://doi.org/10.4018/ijitpm.2017040101
Erceg, A., & Gulam, V. (2018). Importance of alignment of strategy and project management. Interdisciplinary Management Research XIV, 1847–0408.
Yousef Al Sabaa, A. (2009). Aligning Project Management with Business Strategy.