A world without Project Management

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by Valentina Ilie

The word “project” is highly fashionable nowadays. Kids in kindergarten talk about projects they participate in… In most of the interviews we watch, we hear people mentioning they have several projects ongoing… But what is a project and what makes project management indispensable?

So, what makes a set of activities a project? According to traditional project management methodologies (and more specifically, Project Management Institute – PMI), a project is defined as “any temporary endeavor with a beginning and end”. In other words, we need a well-defined scope and a clear timeline by when the outcome is expected to be delivered.

But is that all?

No, a project delivered successfully involves more than just defining a scope and creating and tracking a timeline.  It is a project delivered in the approved scope, time, and budget, but also considering human resources’ well-being and their attitude towards the project, with a high attention to communication channels adjusted to the Stakeholders’ needs and expectations, to people’s adversity to changes, and to projects risks, thus incorporating the mitigation actions resulting from the above into the schedule.

When it comes to international project, many challenges can hinder progress and success if not managed properly, like project resources availability, including also the time zone differences, increased number and impact of the risks, adapting the communication type and content to the Stakeholders needs and expectations and, in some situations, legal challenges.

This is where effective project management serves as the backbone for coordinating complex efforts, ensuring that objectives are met within the desired timeframes and budgets. It provides a structured communication framework that ensures all team members are on the same page, despite their cultural background.

In SG GSC we use project management methodologies and tools to provide the structure and oversight needed to navigate the complexities of global collaboration, ensuring that projects are completed on time, within budget and within scope. It’s becoming clear that the role of project management will increase the success of multinational endeavors.

Things can get done without applying project management methodologies. The question is how and with what consequences? In this situation, projects might slow-down or even stagnate, go off-track, thus missing deadlines, confusions might appear around roles and responsibilities or when disruptions appear, the scope could expand if no clear scope frontiers are established, and the list can go on.

Many people consider that project management is an art because one needs to combine his knowledge, experience with creativity, develop a strong sense of leadership, apply communication skills and many times use his intuition. A project manager plays a vital role in ensuring a project’s success by acting as the central point of coordination and guidance for the entire team.

Still, handling a set of activities as a project involves generating project management deliverables, which consumes time. In the following graph we can observe the average time spent on each project phase and we can see that to deliver a project, the project manager spends between 18% – 32% of his time on activities other than the execution itself.

Fig 1. Time spent on each process group (Andy Crowe, Alpha Project Managers: What the Top 2% Know That Everyone Else Does Not, Velociteach Press, 
2006, after PMwithVee)

Can we live in a world of tasks and no projects? Of course, we can! The results, in many situations, may be very different, because, as we see in the graph above, the time spent on planning pays off during the execution period.

Therefore, before deciding how to handle the execution of a specific scope, one must assess the expected outcome vs the resources & effort needed to reach it with or without project management techniques.

Bibliography: Andy Crowe, Alpha Project Managers: What the Top 2% Know That Everyone Else Does Not, Velociteach Press, 2006, after PMwithVee,
https://epmtutorial.wordpress.com/2020/01/14/time-to-spend-in-each-process-group/