The organization with sound business practices and principles in place will more likely be able to reap the benefits of project management and provide consistent product delivery. Good, solid business practices often lend themselves to providing a company with a strategic advantage in the marketplace as they strive to bring continued excellence in the form of product and services to their customers.
In order to continue achieving product and service excellence in this challenging economic time, organizations must focus on improving their project management practice as the key business driver that will help achieve these advantages for them.
As a profession, project management is able to support the overall business strategy with clear-cut benefits and advantages:
Reduce delivery costs
Project management can allow an organization to provide products and services more cheaply by following a structured and formalized project methodology and by ensuring that excessive costs are not spent without due consideration. Consistent, repeatable practices that a sound project management methodology allows an organization helps to reduce overall costs.
Enable quicker product to market
The advantage permits the business to deliver products or services more efficiently than the competitors and the business is able to react more favorably to market demands. The continued process of using project management best practices allows for a higher degree of project successes thus increasing the competitive advantage that the project management organization brings to the company.
Focus advantage
The projects will be focused more on the client needs and products, instead of having a solution that does not deliver the expected returns. A focused and structured project management practice allows a company to consistently serve their customers well and provide a high quality product.
Produce quality deliverables
Project management builds quality into the products or services right from the start, ensuring that the right things are developed at the right specification. A structured and mature project management practice includes structured testing phases and quality control which helps to ensure quality deliverables are provided to the customer.
Provide customer advantage
Project management gains advantages for their organization by working together with the customer and by accommodating their needs and requirements. Detailed planning phases enable for thorough understanding of customer requirements. This allows the company to fully understand the customer’s true needs and meet those needs allowing for a productive end user solution that can very positively affect customer satisfaction.
Summary
All companies require that the overall strategy be driven from the top of the company in order for projects to be successful. The organizational executive team usually provides the leadership for the overall business and IT strategy. Before any project is even considered, the executive team must assess and align the solution against the business and IT strategy, before committing any project resources to it. The key to project success within the organization and the resulting product excellence is ensuring that the project management practice remains in alignment with the overall mission and goals of the organization.