Project management achieving competitive advantage pdf download
For courses in strategy and strategic management. Just the. In today's economy, gaining and sustaining a competitive advantage is harder than ever. Strategic Managementcaptures. Essentials of Strategic Management responds head-on to the growing requests by business faculty for a concisely-written. Case Study 1. What Do Champions Do? BOX 7. President—Please cancel our project! Project Management: Achieving Competitive Advantage [5 ed.
Employee commitment to goals is important in keeping workers motivated. When employees feel personally committed to company goals, they will work harder and possibly longer , which leads to success.
When planning out resource constraints for a project, it is important to create trust and understanding among managers and employees. Managers are often responsible for approving use of resources from their department and also consult on time requirements for specific tasks. If managers are made an active part of the planning process, they are more willing to allocate resources and give accurate forecasts of time.
Workers also need to feel as though they will not be punished if time frames are not met as long as this is not a persistent problem , otherwise they or their managers may exaggerate the forecasted amount of time to complete a task. Finally, a performance evaluation criterion needs to encourage initiative and risk taking in a project environment.
Additionally, rewards need to be consistent with the goals of the project. A functional organization that desires to move from an adversarial culture to a supportive, interactive one needs to consider several factors.
First, the company should begin by establishing a corporate-wide vision that aims at uniting and motivating workers. Lastly, they will need to establish unambiguous policies on short lines of authority and communication. This will help provide fast and efficient decision-making. You have historically been using a functional structure set up with five departments: finance, human resources, marketing, production, and engineering.
Create a drawing of your simplified functional structure, identifying the five departments. Assume you have decided to move to a project structure. What might be some of the environmental pressures that would contribute to your belief that it is necessary to alter the structure?
With the project structure, you have four ongoing projects: stereo equipment, instrumentation and testing equipment, optical scanners, and defense communications.
Draw the new structure that creates these four projects as part of the organizational chart. Pressure may come from within the organization or from environmental or external sources. There may be pressure to be innovative or pressure from a rapidly changing market. Increased consumer demands or competition also put strain on a functional organization.
These factors require quick response time, high innovation, speedy development, and risk-taking. Functional organizations may have difficulty meeting these needs, but project management can meet them by decreasing the chain of command and decision-making. Re-create the structural design to show how the matrix would look. What behavioral problems could you begin to anticipate through this design?
That is, do you see any potential points of friction in the dual hierarchy setup? Then, the student could indicate a couple of examples of projects e. The key is for students to recognize the joint responsibility for project staffing between the project manager and the functional manager. One of the best responses here is recognizing that the balancing of resources between functional department and project will require negotiation and bargaining between the project manager and the functional department head.
As the textbook notes, matrix is a constant source of friction between department heads, who want to keep their resources working on their own tasks, and project managers, who are seeking to gain access to these resources to support projects.
The people often caught in the middle are the resources themselves, being pulled in multiple directions. The case also demonstrates the manner in which Rolls-Royce must identify and manage its key stakeholder group for maximum effectiveness.
How would you design stakeholder management strategies to address their concerns? Rolls-Royce also must work closely with national governments who subsidize their airlines by resorting to creative financing, long-term contracts, or asset- based trading deals. Students discussing this case can create a large and very diverse stakeholder list. It is useful to illustrate how the desires of some stakeholders may be in direct opposition to the needs or expectations of others, making the point that stakeholder management is often a creative juggling act.
What are the benefits and drawbacks from such an arrangement? In answering this question, it is helpful to first identify the tremendous barriers to entry and the risk factors associated with manufacturing jet engines. What would Rolls-Royce gain from a consortium arrangement?
What could they potentially lose? The arguments can add up on both sides of the ledger, so the instructor can steer this discussion to include issues of stakeholder management, corporate strategy, and even culture, by highlighting the problems with blending conflicting cultures under a consortium arrangement.
Case Study 2. Xerox should have been poised to reap billions; it invested in an advanced research center PARC , hired the best and brightest talent in this fledgling industry, and was first off the mark with a fully- functioning PC, including Ethernet, laser printing, word processing, spreadsheets, and so forth. In short, the Alto was simply too much for Xerox to know how to handle. Discuss the difference between research for its own sake and the need to bring it to market.
Xerox had allowed its culture to become moribund and, hence, their strategic focus was on making incremental improvements. The irony, as instructors may wish to bring up, is that the original Xerox innovation, the model copier, was a radical innovation for its time and led to huge profits for the company. Thus, an organization that made its fortune and reputation on a highly successful and radical innovation could not bring themselves to do the same thing a decade later with the Alto opportunity.
Over the five years after the development of the Alto, a series of ill-timed acquisitions, lawsuits, and reorganizations rendered the PC a casualty of inattention. What division would oversee its development and launch? Whose budget would support it and PARC in general? By leaving those tough decisions unmade, Xerox wasted valuable time and squandered their technological window of opportunity. One important factor to consider is the nature of the industry in which the organization is operating.
For example, it could be argued that office products and information technology, which is the setting in which Xerox competed, requires a willingness to make the radical changes that would not be as necessary in other settings facing less frequent or serious technical changes. Authenticity is signaled by the relationship that develops between the leaders and the followers as they develop either a cooperative or combative working relationship.
The project manager sets the tone; when she creates an atmosphere of distrust, it is much safer for team members to protect themselves by fudging their work estimates. What pressures does the manager face? What pressures does the subordinate face?
In this situation, the project manager faces the pressure of getting the project done as quickly as possible. By subordinating everything to the need for speed, the project manager sends out the message that she only wants to hear good news. If they are likely to be punished for missing their target estimates for the project, they will naturally over-inflate those initials estimates to give themselves sufficient time to complete the assignment.
It now becomes a game between the subordinate and the project manager in which neither is willing to provide authentic information to the other. Subordinates are going to ensure that they protect themselves in the face of a project manager who distrusts them. As noted above, the key lies in authenticity. Where this is lacking, subordinates will assume an attitude of self-preservation. If they cannot trust their boss, they will take necessary steps to protect themselves.
As the case notes, product life cycles have dramatically shortened; however, at the same time, products are slow to market. Many new innovations have passed right by WRU because the company was slow to pick up signs from the marketplace that they were coming.
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