Table of Contents
Introduction
In the world of business, the success of a company depends on a number of aspects. From its supply chain to advertisements, there are multiple things to consider in order to bring your company to the top level. Project management is undoubtedly among the crucial factors and close attention needs to be paid to it. In this paper, the relation of project management and the performance of a company will be discussed in details. As found in this paper, both project management and performance are directly proportional to each other. Project management plays a pivotal role in the performance of a company: a good project management will lead to high performance of the company and a bad one will lead to low performance.
Research shows that poor project management on an average, causes an 11% loss in major projects, across all industries. Project management to manage major projects relies on methodologies, intellectual capital, knowledge, innovation, and experience. For example, in the current multicultural corporate environment of multinational corporations, project management is used to analyze, identify and resolve multicultural conflicts and potential threats. In addition, this paper discusses the role of Project Management Office (PMO) in the corporate environment, their roles and responsibilities, and their vetting issues. Adopting Agile Methods is an example that is introduced to show the popular and efficient project management solution and its impact. The paper will also give examples of the relationship between project management and the company’s performance through actual cases. This is a brief introduction to the paper below.
Project Management Cases in Company Operations
The role of PMO in the corporate environment
The Project Management Office (PMO) is responsible for standardizing the operational model of project management during the project management process. At the same time, the PMO will coordinate the progress of the various departments involved in the project and integrate the resources of each department. The amount of resources used in the course of the project is likely to exceed the original plan, or because of the unreasonable allocation, the resource resources of one project group are excessive, while the resources of other project groups are insufficient. At this time, the PMO should play the role of resource redistribution and coordinate the resource management of each project.
Project management analyzes and resolves conflicts of diversity in multinational corporations
The background of employees in multinational companies is often complex. They come from different countries and have different growth environments and religious beliefs. In the course of work, employees of different backgrounds may not be able to understand each other because of differences in cultural barriers and values. At this time, reasonable project management should be able to prepare solutions in advance, dilute the conflicts between employees of different backgrounds, promote the progress of the project, and affect the company’s corporate culture.
Case analysis of adapting Agile Methods
Agile methodology is now the most popular software engineering management solution, with the most commonly used Scrum method being used by almost every mature enterprise. Agile is developed in an iterative manner with Sprint, which is ideal for the development process of requirements analysis, design, development, repair and maintenance of software engineering. The introduction of Agile’s methodology in an existing project is a question worth exploring, and we will discuss how to integrate the Agile approach into a common project management.
Effective Project Management
Tis reports work on progress on the development and implementation of a framework for knowledge creating and sharing corporate culture, which are critical processes in knowledge management into organizational environments.Knowledge is defined by Davenport (1998) as a set of experiences, values, skills and information related to experts’ viewpoints that provides a frame for combination and evaluation of information and new experiences. Davenport (1999) suggests that knowledge management has two distinctive tasks: to facilitate the creation of new knowledge and to manage the way people share and apply it.
Responsibilities and Functions of PMO
The main role of PMO is not limited to defining the standard of project management but also to ensure that the smooth functionality of the work. It is the foundation of the organisation which helps in decision making but do not take decision of its own. A PMO supports the undertaking conveyance components by guaranteeing that all business change in an association is overseen in a standard way. There are several functions and services offered by PMO but there jobs rely greatly on the maturity of the department and the aptitude of the personnel in the team.further in the paper we will discuss the responsibilities and functions performed by PMO in details.
Project management methodologies
There are different ways of managing projects that determine how the project is planned and executed. Depending on the project management methodology chosen, the course of actions can take different directions. For both leadership and team members it is vital to understand which methodology was chosen. Without a clear understanding of which strategy is followed, it can get confusing for both parties. Team members will not be able to perform well if they do not see the roadmap. If they are confused and do not see a structure in a project, there is a possibility of doing things wrong and causing disruption in the process.
Similarly, leadership has to clearly understand what they want delivered and how they want it delivered in order to be able to provide good instructions to their teams. Plus, usually a project is a part of the company’s goals. Therefore, not following a strategy in project management can lead to failure in performing a deliverable, which then leads to company’s failure. We can see that setting a project management methodology is a critical factor that determines the company’s success and compliance to the overall strategies.
Challenges of project management
In today’s rapidly growing economy the time plays a very important role. Delays in deliverables and goals could mean loss of reputation and potentially loss of business. In spite of having the necessary funding and resources, there are many IT projects that still fail. Researchers found that one out of five IT-projects run out of time, budget or value. Many times the reason for failure is sudden changes in economy during the project’s runtime. To avoid such failures it is necessary to identify the emerging risks and take immediate action to prevent the potential loss. A continuous steering of project is critical to meet the set goals and prevent failures. A project manager is the person who keeps such things in check.
Challenges in managing global projects Global project management has an extended scope with different challenges than national projects (Li, 2009, Hoffmann, Schoper & Fitsimons, 2004). The insecurity in the global field with its cross-cultural conditions is caused mainly by the foreign environment (Dülfer, 2011) and the people including team members and stakeholders from diverse cultures with different ways of thinking and working procedures. The Global projects are often fast paced and project managers are required to set up the frame work within very short span of time.
Experiences from past projects cannot simply be transferred to a new project. It is just impossible to predict where the next project will take place and which partners will be involved. Each project is different and comes along with varying conditions. Global project management is a highly dynamic domain. Handling all the differences and coping with the on-going instability presents a big challenge for any project manager. Experienced managers know that cultural misunderstandings can be avoided in advance if one is alert and pays attention. Cultural differences in business dealings can be bridged if the appropriate tools are applied (Ranf, 2010). Intercultural skills are by all means learnable.
Balancing vertical and horizontal leadership in projects: Two noteworthy floods of research have risen in concentrates on project management: the individual focused or vertical leadership stream, which spotlights on the leadership job and aptitudes of project directors; and the group focused or horizontal leadership stream, which perceives the circulated type of leadership in projects. Past research in project leadership has concentrated for the most part on vertical leadership while in late investigations horizontal leadership has started to develop as a significant region. A project manager has to balance both of these leaderships to maintain stability of environment and achieve the goals.
Complexity of Projects: ects have become more and more complex because of the increasing factors that are considered source of complexity. A large amount of required resources, a turbulent environment, working on the edge of technology, and a large number and diversity of actors working and communicating with each other are all factors that affect project outcome. is complex environment influences project planning, coordination, and control; it can also affect the selection of an appropriate project organization structure and hinder the clear identification of project goals. When problems fundamentally dynamic are treated statically, delays and cost overruns are common.
Experience suggests that the interrelationships between the project’s components are more complex than it is suggested by traditional approaches. ese, traditional approaches, using a static approach, provide project managers with unrealistic estimations that ignore the nonlinear relationships of a project and, thus, are inadequate to the challenge of today’s dynamic and complex projects. Complex projects demand an exceptional level of management and the application of the traditional tools and techniques developed for ordinary projects have been found to be inappropriate for complex projects. Complex Project Management is a specialist profession that requires a specific set of competencies and a deep understanding of the project and its environment. If project managers want to execute a project successfully, in a context of increased complexity, it is not only necessary that they attend the demands of an increasingly complex environment.
Risk Management: Every project has its own risks which are discovered throughout the runtime of the project. One of the critical responsibilities of the project manager is identify the emerging risks and immediately take appropriate action to avoid any delays in deliverables.
Team and resource Management: Each project is unique and requires people with specific skill set to accomplish it at different stages. Many times, It becomes difficult to find specific skill sets due to various reasons like budget, location, technology etc. It is very crucial on the part of Project manager to analyze the requirement of the project beforehand and get the right resources involved at different stages of the project to complete is smoothly in the given time frame.
Project Management Process that Improves the Overall Performance
Project management includes more thinking and communicating. In Large scale industries or Organizations or companies, they do have a bunch of projects they work on, altogether by distributing to different departments or locations at the same time and the companies will have a complicated situation at this moment for managing the projects. In these challenging situations, they need a systematic balancing procedure, which is very important for the Industry environment.
- Conception and Initiation
The first stage of the project. In this stage we can make decisions about the project, which is feasible and can be considered or not. If it is reasonable, then the testing and verifications will be held in this phase by the team lead. The main goal of this phase is to examine the project proposal by raising questions about the importance of the project, scope of it and can be trustworthy for partners. It leads to the development of the project. (Greg Horine 2012)
- Definition and Planning
The second stage which improves and focuses on developing the project. It can be a crucial stage for successful Project Management. This phase used to set a strategize that can follow further to initiate. The project must be realistic and accurate for success. It has to analyze the potential and complications which helps for detailed examination and performance measures.