Project Management AND Enterprise Intelligence Quotient

From the project itself to the implementation of the organization of the project, this is the soul of modern project management.

Project management is no longer just a tool, but a discipline and technology about organization, organization's maturity, organizational capabilities and organizational intelligence.

10 many years ago, when the returned overseas MBA graduates returned to the country, they had a sigh of no job opportunities. After more than 10 years, MBA became the most expensive business category in degree education.

Today, people have discovered a new business variety - "project management qualification certification (PMP)". Despite the high cost of training and examination, the market is still fierce.

Some people claim that "twenty-first Century will be the era of project management", and some scholars have profoundly expressed that it is like Taylor to create action time analysis, labor quota, Gantt inventing horizontal road map, Deming advocating quality management (TQC), and "re discovering project management".

In fact, if we only say that the start of a project must go through complex argumentation, lengthy decision-making and boring planning and budget process, "project" should be no stranger to a country that pursues planned economy for more than 30 years.

However, scholars are trying to awaken the nature of project management which is not this color. Scholars are trying to wake up a kind of "ubiquitous" project management, or "Pan project management".

The development of international project management in "Pan project" management has greatly broken through the boundaries of traditional "construction project management", and all "one-off activities" conforming to the project definition can be regarded as "projects".

As a result, performing activities, funerals, diplomatic mediation, and even a friend gathering can be openly regarded as "project".

In this changing world, there is nothing in the changing world. "Change is a normal thing", and even a new branch of strategic management is called Change Management.

The legacy left by the 20 century to the twenty-first Century is highlighted by "project management". In the area of "project management of terrorist activities", "project management of military strikes", and "military alliance project", "Argentina bankruptcy project" and "Enron bankruptcy project", it is very significant: any project can be planned.

From the perspective of terrorists, "9. 11" is not a very "successful" project management?

Since the 80s 20, the rapid rise of microcomputers and the explosive growth of the Internet since 90s have provided countless "good looking and tasty" weapons for solving the classical project management methods.

So what is it that makes "project management" a "craftsman's topic"?

It is possible for us to get a glimpse of the rapid development of project management from home and abroad.

Computing is no longer a bottleneck. Some experts have put things like partnership, system reorganization, integrated management and venture capital into microscope under the "project".

In their eyes, any development activities, pformation activities and reorganization activities can be placed in the framework of the project, and they should be recognized, planned, organized, operated and evaluated.

One of the main reasons for the prosperity of the project is probably because the cost of planning a project has been greatly reduced after the computer industry is booming.

Like the manned spaceship project in 1960s and the "Manhattan plan", a lot of money spent in solving and iterating huge sums of equations is enough to make "project management" an awesome business.

At that time, project management often corresponded to a series of activities and affairs, such as dam project, nuclear power plant project, highway project and overhaul project of 17 rod rolling mill.

Another major reason for the prosperity of the project is probably subjective.

For example, Jobs invented Apple and Bill Gate to play the role of software, that is, "planning" an activity and ensuring its success, which is the life style of hacker philosophy and Yap style in the 30 years after twentieth Century.

The "disposable" attribution unfortunately becomes synonymous with consumerism.

Whenever a one-time activity can be regarded as a "project", the generalization and prosperity of the project is overwhelming.

In modern project management, the main obstacle to plan a project is not computation but imagination.

However, a variation in Pan projects seems to have not been identified, which needs to be scrutinize.

The "disposable" and "complexity" of 20 at the beginning of the century, the management scientists believe that through the decomposition of homework and activities and the corresponding time analysis, we can get the estimate of the beginning time and the completion time of a job, and combine these sequential operations and activities to get a possible set of job combinations.

As a result, the project experts affirm that there must be one or a series of activities, which consumes the longest time and thus becomes the "necking" activity of the whole project, which is called "critical path".

If such a route can be identified, there will be a time base (Timeline) for other activities.

Project management is certainly not just about scheduling.

More importantly, we should consider the possible optimization problems in the process planning: resource scheduling optimization, pportation optimization, labor time optimization and so on.

Finally, through the optimization of time, resources and cost, the optimal function of the project can be solved to reflect the financial objectives of project control.

In classical project management, such as classical music or classical church frescoes, there is a hypothesis that projects can be managed by "numbers".

However, "Pan project" does not seem to be the case.

Whether or not it can be managed by numbers is a secondary problem. "Disposable" has become an important symbol.

This is the so-called "Pan project" to the classical project "variation".

In the 1988 issue of Harvard Business Review, "the emergence of a new organization", Drucker discussed the main features of the new information organization.

He pointed out that knowledge organization, common strategic vision, implementation of experts' ability rather than incentive methods based on their positions, massive team work methods and task teams with integrated values, and decentralization and autonomy are the organizational forms of new enterprises in the future.

The appropriate background for observing the revival of project management is information technology.

But it does not mean that information technology provides fast computing power, which leads to more convenient implementation of project management. Nor does it mean that the use of greater storage capacity and visualization technology, graphics and image technology makes the project "portrayed" more detailed, although these can be regarded as a fashionable version of project management.

The impact of information technology on project management is not only on the technical level, but also on the organizational level.

An important aspect of information technology that has changed people's understanding of projects is the organization of projects.

Motorola, as a world-famous communications equipment and service provider, launched a plan to improve its project management capacity in the middle of 1990s.

In the face of global competition, product development and service of enterprises must be faster and cheaper.

The organization and management mode of enterprise division is becoming more and more inappropriate, and the organization form is becoming more and more obvious.

Therefore, for a new organization, the "one-off" of the project is only a superficial phenomenon of project management, and the value is the horizontal integration ability of the project team.

This capability seems to be "intrinsic endowment of project management".

The team can do horizontal joint operations and vertical communication and cooperation.

Project management can effectively avoid ambiguity and difficulty in connection in enterprises.

Besides, the extension of project management is also expanding.

Since 1980s, the application of project management has expanded to other industries, such as pharmaceutical industry, telecommunications sector, software development industry, etc.

Project managers are no longer considered to be just project executors, but require them to be more competent in other fields and have certain business skills.

Under such circumstances, the basic abilities of effective professional project managers proposed by PMI include: human resource management, communication management, time management, risk management, procurement management, cost management, quality management, integrated management and other management fields.

In some ways, project manager is just another version of MBA.

In this sense, the reasons why project management is so popular can be summarized as follows: project management is oriented towards achievement (concerned with the completion of tasks); project management is based on team work; project management provides cross functional departments with external resources; project management effectively reduces costs through external resources; project management is flexible (changeable).

No wonder fortune predicts that project managers will become the first choice for young people in the twenty-first Century.

Take the software project as an example, modern management has a tendency to shift from preference management to preference process management.

According to Drucker's view, the R&D Department of an enterprise is a model for the innovation of knowledge organization structure, especially the software development organization.

The process attribute of software engineering can be regarded as a paragon of modern project management.

Software engineering can be said to be the most faithful field of project management and engineering methods.

But what is troubling is that software engineering often seems to be in a dilemma.

Since the "software crisis" became an academic term in 1969, efforts to overcome the software crisis have been carried out under the framework of "project management", such as structured software method, prototyping software method and object-oriented software engineering method.

It is generally believed that the development efficiency, usability and quality of software ultimately depend on the requirement analysis of software.

If there is a defect in the description of the requirements of a system, then the software will not achieve the desired goal in any case.

It is believed that software is a process designed according to the result of requirement analysis, and it is undoubtedly an engineering method.

The biggest feature of engineering methods is that there are first designs and then works.

Software engineering management has attracted wide attention since the mid 1970s.

At that time, the Department of defense of the United States made a special study of the reasons why software projects did not work well. It was found that 70% of the projects were caused by poor management, not because of insufficient technical strength, and then came to the conclusion that management is a factor affecting the overall situation of software R & D projects, while technology only affects parts.

This conclusion is very important.

By the mid 1990s, the problem of poor software engineering management still existed.

The main reasons for the failure of the software project are: the definition of demand is not clear; there is a lack of a good software development process; there is not a unified product development team with a unified leadership; sub contract management is not strict; there is no constant attention to improving the software process; the software architecture is not attached importance to; the definition of the soft interface is poor, and the lack of proper control and so on.

Among the many factors related to the success of software projects, software metrics, workload estimation, project planning, progress control, demand change and risk management are all directly related to project management.

Although software engineering management and other engineering management have their own particularity.

For example, software is a knowledge product, and its progress and quality are difficult to measure, and production efficiency is also difficult to guarantee.

Secondly, the complexity of software system is beyond imagination.

However, the engineering characteristics of software project management have not changed, and the analysis synthesis framework of software engineering has not changed.

If you look at project management at this level, there is really nothing to be excited about.

Everything is just faster, more integrated and more complex.

The importance of the discovery process is only equivalent to the careful attention to the details.

It should be said that the software capability maturity model CMM proposed by MIT in 1980s has led attention to the right direction, that is, the maturity of the organization that projects exist and expand.

This is a brand new perspective.

Engineering problems can easily be simplified as sharp tools, which can be reduced to a process based on objectives.

Project failure can also be found in project management.

But the maturity level of the organization is indeed a good exploration direction.

First, CMM does not simply examine projects, but examines the evolution of organizations and organizations.

If an organization gains the ability to upgrade through projects, such as more and more standardized and consistent software processes, more and more predictable software processes, software project optimization is a continuously optimized and perceptible process, and so on, which reflects the maturity of the organization.

CMM emphasizes organizational capabilities rather than things that appear more often in rules and methods in project management.