What difference does good project management make? The role of a project manager is exciting because it involves leading without hierarchical power. Leading as a project manager is very different from leading a department.
Project team, project manager, project plan, project management software - everything about good project management
As a project manager, I cannot simply "rule through", give instructions and rely on my colleagues to do what I expect of them by virtue of my position. Rather, I find myself in a conflicting situation between the requirements of my project and the requirements that the department places on my colleagues who come from that same department. The respective department does not even have to be in my company, because the company boundary as a system boundary for projects is becoming increasingly irrelevant.
Where something truly new is created, people from different disciplines and therefore often from different institutions have to come together and work together. Where these collaborations can be organized in a truly cooperative manner, a real competitive advantage is created. Good project management makes the difference. Good project management ensures that a team is able to work as ad hoc as possible and that the collaboration is successful in the long term. In this case, "good" means smooth, with as little duplication of work as possible, open and goal-oriented in terms of the benefit that a project is intended to provide.
Project team, project manager, project plan, project management software - everything about good project management
We are all socialized in a Taylorist way; our companies are largely based on a division of labor and are usually structured with the ideal of stable processes. This form of organization has made us successful since the beginning of industrialization and still helps us today to sell very complex products at relatively low prices. In a Taylorist organization there are clearly defined positions that are "responsible" for defined tasks. Who does what is defined by job descriptions and specified by management. This keeps transaction costs low because there is no need to constantly renegotiate who does what. This type of collaboration and work organization is ideally suited where already defined tasks are to be carried out in large quantities, i.e. with repetition, to achieve good results.
In such an organizational form, work is delegated to a department based on its responsibilities. russia telegram data The supervisor, also a word from the Taylor school of thought, decides and organizes the distribution of work among the various people in his team. Today, if you look closely, in most cases software organizes this distribution of work and the supervisors only decide on cases of conflict and problems.
This basic understanding of delegating work to departments does not work in projects. There is no defined responsibility because the tasks within a project are new. In projects, I have new tasks that were not yet defined for the organization at the time of the assignment. It may be that subtasks for marketing experts are pending. However, these are not (yet) included in the job description of the marketing employees, which means that "marketing" is not responsible for the time being. Only when "marketing" feels responsible and agrees to take on the task can I, as the project manager, assume that the work will be done. There is no automatic guarantee that "marketing" will support me in my project.
Many projects that are not making good progress fail at exactly this point: because – to stay with the example – these are marketing tasks, “people” automatically assume that “marketing” “has to take care of it. If the specialist department sees things differently, which can certainly happen in times of high workload, there will be arguments. Excuses help to mask the arguments with objectivity, which does not exactly make it easier to find the cause: “We need precise requirements before we can do the work!” The project stalls. At this point, leadership is needed, although it would have been wiser (and cheaper) to let leadership take effect earlier.