PICMET @ Newsletter   
                                January, 2004, Vol.1 Number 1                         

By Peerasit Patanakul and Dragan Milosevic

Recent research in the project management discipline places emphasis on establishing a link between organizational strategy and project management.  For some organizations, projects are the vehicles to business success.  Managing a project to its success is therefore very important.  An organization has to be assured that its project management, starting from project selection to project dissemination, is in line with its organizational strategy. 

How can an organization be assured of this? An answer is suggested by several research centers examining project selection.  They propose that projects should be selected with a consideration of organizational factors:  mission, objectives, goals, strategies, etc.  After being selected, each project carries the identity of these organizational factors.  However, in many organizations, project selection is done at the executive level.  How can these organizational factors, e.g. strategies embedded in projects, be deployed down effectively to the operational level of project management?

 One answer is that they can be deployed down through project manager assignments.  After projects are assigned, project managers are the ones who handle these projects to their success.  The success of these projects contributes to the accomplishment of the organizational strategy, which in turn, contributes to the business success of an organization.

 How can we know that a project manager will lead a project to its success?  Does he have any limitations that could prevent him from leading the project?  What should be considered in project manager assignments?

To answer these questions, we studied the project manager assignment process of six companies in high velocity industries.  We followed the case study research methodology based on interviews, document reviews, and observation.  Furthermore, we established a panel of experts and followed the Delphi method for the evaluation of our findings.  We found that an organization should take into account organizational factors, project requirements, competencies of project managers, and organizational constraints in project manager assignments.        

  Organizational factors 

As previously mentioned, organizational factors are strategic elements of an organization such as organizational goals or strategies.  We found from our study that for companies in high velocity industries, these factors are business-related, operational-related, and technology-related goals, e.g. to increase profitability, to increase revenue, to accelerate time-to-market speed, to improve customer satisfaction, and to strengthen and leverage technological competence.  These factors reflect the strategic direction of an organization, and they should be considered during project manager assignments.    

 To do so, these factors are used to evaluate the degree to which projects contribute to their accomplishment, thus prioritizing projects for an organization.  An important project, which has a great contribution to the strategic elements of an organization, should be assigned to a competent project manager. Continue

Please contact patanap@etm.pdx.edu for further details of this study.

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