The first part of this article is an analysis which in a viewpoint of evolution to understand and anticipate the change of project management. Second part is to further illustrate how those changes affect the environment of project management and eventually change the role of project manager. The last three parts are combination of conceptual and practical elements to elaborate one fact that the competence of a project manager is the key factor to both project success and organization success. Evolution of project management “A project is a temporary endeavor undertaken to produce a unique product, service or result.
And project management is the application of knowledge, tools and techniques to project activities to achieve project requirements. ” -? MAMBO. As society and organizational structures have shifted over years, the tools and techniques, methodologies, factors and requirements of project management have consequently change d as showing below in Figurer. Figurer project management evolution timeline Project management is a methodology which was originally developed to purr sue maximum utility of resources in order to accomplish a common goal, in this case, I think its fair to say that I it’s based on utilitarianism. 2
Picture and illustration origin from w. Iv. Protectorate’s. Com The “big bang” period At the very first evolutionary step, the project objective was mainly for living. People are organized to utilizes limited resources for survival or better life. Even though the achievement of manage meet is remarkable where we can see the concrete evidence like the pyramids in Egypt or the Chinese great wall. These astonish inning artificers also prove that people have already found a model to work efficiently together in this prehistoric period. And a hierarchy organization was recognized as the one and only sol caution at that time. The industrialization the hard facts Within the next step of industrialization and mechanization, people started to make a division of work in production line. The business processes were divided into small work steps to produce a product or service. They started to realize that it is more likely to get an “secure” project approach by detailed planning of tasks. The ” Tailors”3 dominated through people at this time as Henry Ford surprised the world with his automobile empire. 3. The soft facts As a result of productive rate increasing, the complexity of product increased as w ell and speeded up their life cycles.
Industrialists like Henry Ford soon observed that the “hard facts” (scientific management) has its limit. The further improvement of efficiency is mainly contributed by knowledge workers who has “special know how’ within himself, “trust” from other project partners (from leaders, project colleagues or suppliers and customers) and a social network from previous successful project work. And it’s the first time people begin to recognize that all people are different in their objectives, senses, set of beliefs, construction of reality and needs.
Individual leadership within a project is practically important. . Multipurpose management As the competitive pressure and complexity accumulating, the “traditional model” to work together could no longer fulfill increasing complicated requirements and dynamic of market. The limited amount of “knowledge workers” were seen as scarce resources and required to be balanced within project programs or project portfolios in several dimensions of procrastination. And industrialists begun to pursuing Increase of long term survival of the company in global society and economy.
As it well illustrated by Jim Collins in his book “Good to great” the “Level 5 Manager”4 . 5. Utter Trial project management competence 3 Scientific management, also called Tailors, is a theory’ of management that t analyzes and synthesizes workflow. Its main objective is improving economic efficiency, especially labor productivity. It was one of the earliest attempts to apply science to the engineering of processes and to management. Its development began with Frederick Winslow Taylor in the sass and 1 8905 within the manufacturing industries. Collins often discusses a “Level 5 leader” in his writings. This refers to the pea k of a fitter hierarchy of leadership characteristics presented in the books. A Level 5 Leader is someone who embed dies a “paradoxical mix of personal humility and professional will. ” 2 Today we have nearly all information in real time by multidimensional corporate communication networks and Internet. And shareholder driven companies are required to grow steadily because of the ” compound interest agreement”, and they are Inevitably required to start “super national” (e. G.
European wide) or global expansion activities to overcome the local market saturation. The world is becoming flat where companies confront with intercultural problems and business environment changes. They Start heading toward a new there of problems such as customer requirements, competitor environment, supplier structures, logistic chain, finance flow, the legal environment, climate, values of beliefs and historic cult rural development. 6. Netter Trial project cooperation competence Today the high development and successful centralization of technology require a knowledge intensive competence within companies.
Inverness, the ability to adapt with the dynamic of markets and shorten product life cycles is getting more and more crucial. And the research of Exonerative predicts that after the current yes (development of monoculture cooperation) will follow the “real globalization” with the global masterwork of intercultural cooperation. That’s why the competence to realize and manage intercultural project cooperation and develop the corporate culture between companies will become existential importance.
Sociological development models e. G. Spiral Dynamics also show that people and social human systems including those from a certain level Of conciseness (Value Meme 8) are going to take the evolutionary step from previous “Misapplied contracts” to interdependent cooperation. 7. The lifework balance firework balance is a step where project work, private and family life are bal once. Current studies show that the increasing complexity and dynamic working environment causes a lot of psychological illnesses.
Only the balance between intensive work and recreation, spare time and time with the family is the foundation Of a long term fulfilled life Of happiness. 8. The consciousness level balance 5 From “The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Identifiers Century’ , an intern cantonal bestselling book by Thomas L. Friedman that analyzes globalization, primarily in the early 21st century. The t title is a metaphor for viewing the world as a level playing field in terms of commerce, where all competitors have an equal opportunity. In economics, Exonerative waves (also called cypresses,great surges, long w eaves, Saves or the long economic cycle) are supposedly jellylike phenomena in the modern world economy. It is claim med that the period of the wave ranges from forty to sixty years, the cycles consist of alternating intervals between high sec Doral growth and intervals of relatively slow growth. 7 Spiral Dynamics is a dynamic model of human development and development of mimes carrying systems such as a social network, society or company introduced in the 1996 book Spiral Dana miss by Don Beck and Chris Cowan.
The book was based on the 1 sass theories of psychologist Clare W. Graves. Spiral Dynamics argues that human nature is not fixed: humans are able, when forced by life conditions, to adapt to their envier moment by constructing new, more complex, conceptual models of the world that allow them to handle the new problems. 8 A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices that c an be transmitted from one mind to another wrought writing speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked theme.
The fact is that there is barely human being who has achieved power and economical wealth is really internally satisfied and completely fulfilled with happiness. They often suffer from dissatisfaction or deep, highly unpleasant loneliness. The project manager who achieves the balance of his consciousness levels in this Step , will increase his lifetime periods in happiness by personality developing “selfless”. He will develop the ability to flower out his full consciousness potential on the level of the person lit (Ego/intelligence/mind) to the level of visible world.
The difficulties of project manager in contemporary society As going through the above mentioned evolution process, we can sum up that the project management changes from industrial driven (hard skill oriented) to people driven (soft skill oriented), from national management to global cooperation and from material to immaterial satisfaction. But there are one thing remain unchanged that the project can only be completed by team, which means project performance can be seen as team performance not only externally (by sponsor) but also internally (by team members).
And team building can be affected by several factors, such as individual characters and expertise, HRS cost and availability, project WEBS and organizational norms. One simple universal fact is that there is no “recipe ” (one fits for all) of project management, different team structures may suit for different project types, and project managers need to adopt different roles with different responsibilities in different team structures accord Nagy. A contemporary project manager has to embody all the relative skills into himself to make projects success in all circumstances.
Complicated diversity of project types As time being, projects are getting more and more complicated, the simple production project which dominated in the past is no longer enough to cover all the diversity of projects. And there is a lot of way to categorize projects, they can be divided into longer, midterm and shorter projects by time, or they ca n be categorized by purposes as shown in Figurer, and each type of project will need different tea m strategy in correspondent. Figure 2 Types of projects As project team, it can be oversimplified into two categories , Mechanist Structure and Matrix Structure. (see Figurer as below) Figure 3 : Type of project teams Mechanist structure is more suitable for classic project which highly focus on tasks and results which are comparatively familiar, and as a result resource management will be the most crucial factor. Matrix structure is more relying on collaboration instead of cooperation, where codependent is needed and it is especially effective in innovation project , and network management is highly valued. . Various competence of project manager As the team structures shift, the success of the project management function will depend heavily upon the project managers’ entrepreneurship, outworking, and collaboration skills. All of them are relying on good communication, without frequent, effective, and efficient communication among the project manager, project team, project sponsor, and other stakeholders, a project is likely headed toward disaster despite how good technical expertise the project manager has.
Wisped defines collaboration as : “working together retro achieve a goal. It is a recursive process where two or more people or organizations work together to realize shared goals”. The idea behind collaboration is that the sum of all elements is always greater n value than a single element, and it is the best way to codebook a stronger product or service to stakeholders. It is well illustrated by George Bernard Shaw : “If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and will still each have one apple.
But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exec angle these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas. ” The future of project management will emphasize strong internal entrepreneurial roles where individuals are expected to partner and collaborate on tasks to deliver greater value to the customers resulting in a sustainable competitive advantage. The competence of adapting different roles in different team with different projects to not only make the right thing but also make things right, will be the true shall Eng to a good project manager. 3.
Complexity Of Stakeholders’ satisfactions Defining a project success is not solely by the golden triangle of project management ( cost, time, quality) but dependent upon its stakeholders, which means without the satisfaction of stakeholders, a success project can and will be seen as a fall in project management. But every person, from the project manager to the CEO, could has a different idea of what success means-?and often that’s why teams don’t get projects done efficiently. Nowadays, things are getting even more complicated because of the social net work blossom.
Industry is not the only one gets globalization in modern time, so does the NIMBI, ” Noting my backyard” becomes more and more Often ” Not in my neigh brood” even “nothing anywhere”. 9 This fact emphasizes the demand for building and sustaining strong relationships with individuals not only internal but also external to the project engagement, information shared across boundaries will enhance the capabilities available t meet the needs of that climate. 9 BANANA is an acronym for “Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything g” (or ‘Anyone”).
The term is most often used to criticize the ongoing opposition of certain advocacy groups to land De velveteen. 6 Additionally, expanding relationships across multiple functional divisions throughout the organization will help identify new opportunities and quickly bring expert personnel together to generate a solution. The ending result equates to a satisfied business sponsor whose needs are being met. To sum up, skills focusing on managing project itself is far from enough or a project manager in nowadays, and stakeholders are not anymore solely whom project are related directly.
A contemporary project manager now manages with things more and more metaphysical, which is not well covered by the project management methodology yet. And we as a future project manager, have to understand and realize those characteristics to create our own solutions and methods to get projects done. The spell of hierarchy in Taiwan A Chinese proverb says . ” From rags to riches and back again takes only three generations” 1 0, which is an old saying to encourage people not relying on family wealth UT to explore your own fortune in life.
Inverness, it is also a very true spell in Taiwanese business environment. In Taiwan, most successful .NET reprises are family business, and all successful enterprises 11 are strongly high hierarchical organization. All those wealthiest people on Forbes’ list today are funded himself or the second generation, it may be too premature to judge their future, but history always repeats itself. Let’s take ACRE as example, it was established by Stan Shih, and under his lead it becomes the biggest PC supplier in Europe and 13th in the world.
But things going down after he stepped own the CEO and retired, the successor misjudged the trend of SIS and Android which eventually causes a tremendous financial loss since 2010. The company is still facing the survival crisis and desperately recruits Stan Shin back in charge who is already 70 years old in 2014. Jack Ma, the founder of Alabama group, once commented that : ” It will be a hopeless place, if someone who is over 70 still have to talk about innovation. ” On the other hand , most of the biggest western enterprises are as well family business, but they don’t have such a problem.
It proves that family ownership is not the etiology, the devil is hidden in he organization : hierarchy. Since 221 BC , Chinese people was already used to hierarchical domination. In history, every revolution in china is just a repetition to espouse another emperor until 19th century. Even in contemporary, democracy in Taiwan is still like a walking baby. It seems like there is a tendency of us to obey and seek of r super leaders, every candidate was made up as hero during campaign, where the spotlight is law yes on the candidate himself instead of his manifesto.
Just like in ancient time that every emperor had to be believed as the true blood of god. In this mind Of cultural , Hierarchy and Coercion undoubtedly becomes the most welkin and popular way to lead and even be leaded, not only in politic but also in business. 10 11 There is a similar English proverb : ‘from clogs to clogs is only three generation NSA”. According to Forbes Twain’s 40 richest list Undeniable that hierarchy organization is the most efficient one, but its drawback could be deadly in contemporary.
Because after internet was invented, the information starts flying and product life cycle is further compressing and the demand of innovation becomes skyrocketing high. Under the hierarchy structure, everyone is afraid of making mistake, the goal of employees becomes to accomplish your superior’s satisfaction or even anticipate it. The individual objective overvalue the organizational objective, personal interest in power ladder is more important than company’s best interest, and the innovative ideas are often killed or buried during this process.
That’s also why most of the famous Taiwanese enterprises are all MEMO suppliers, and even there once are some famous brands like ACRE, SASS, ETC, they can’t sustain long and all facing survival crisis today. 12 Break the spell by project management Over this decade, the number of PM in Taiwan grows significantly from hundreds to more than twelve thousands. A PM certification is not anymore a “plus” , but a “must” for applying a manager position nowadays.
The seed of preconditioned anarchically organization has been planted, and I believe it will definitely sprout someday. Every project is an opportunity to bring different experts across the organization together, to cooperate and collaborate in a limited time scheme, which means no time for bureaucracy that people can be released from hierarchy and focus on problem solving. Every project is a synergy of organization, not only vertically but also horizontally and it can be seen as an authorized way to break the exist structure to work together.
