Is the Importance of Project Management Diminishing?

The importance of project management has become more and more significant today especially in today's market situation. The current economy and downturn, as well as highly competitive market have made our current market change totally. For example, if you look at the mobile phone market today comparing to the market 10 years ago, how many different phone models did we have 10 years ago comparing to present market? How many colors did we have 10 years ago comparing to now? Of course, the answer is quite clear that we have only one or a few colors and a few models. Today, we have thousands or even millions of different brands and models that we are not able to count them. Thus, it shows us that we have moved from a low mix market environment to a high mix environment. When I mention mix is means mixture of models or products.

When we are in a high mix market, it means that we have to introduce more and more products to be competitive. If we need to introduce more products, it means that we need to have more research and development or more innovation to develop and design new products or models for the market. And, all these innovations require project teams. Therefore, you can see that project management has become very important to the business.

Before we go further, let us define project management. It is the discipline of planning, organizing and managing resources to bring about the successful completion of specific project goals and objectives as defined in Wikipedia. A project is a temporary endeavor, having a defined beginning and end (usually constrained by date, but can be by funding or budget), undertaken to meet particular goals and objectives, usually to bring about beneficial change or added value. The temporary nature of projects stands in contrast to business as usual (or operations), which are repetitive, permanent or semi-permanent functional work to produce products or services. In practice, the management of these two systems is often found to be quite different, and as such requires the development of distinct technical skills and the adoption of separate management.

With today's highly competitive market, the life cycle of a product is also getting shorter and shorter. It sometimes or more often now is so short that it is considered a project by itself. Some product complete life cycle is so short that it may only be a few months. In this type of environment, managing the whole product life cycle from product development to launching to end of life is just like managing a project because the time frame involved is so short. Therefore, now you can feel its importance to your managers, supervisors and engineers in your operations. If you would like to excel in your market, you must equip your personnel with the right project management skills.

There are two established certification programs that your personnel can be certified which is

- PRINCE2 Project Management

- Project Management Institute

I found out that one of the most common challenges faced by a project team is that they are not able to meet the planned deadline. Why is that so? Most design engineers are good technically but they are lacked of project management skills. Project management skills and technical know-how are two different things so sometimes a good engineer does not mean that he or she will be a good project manager. It is very critical to equip your managers and engineers with the project management skills so that they can manage their projects successfully.