opportunities as projects are brought to fruition. Because of economics and common sense, project management techniques need to be tailored to the specific risks and opportunities of each project. The methodology provides a means for selecting the degree of project management attention appropriate for your particular project.

You may encounter projects in which the apparent risks are so small in certain areas that, while those areas should be monitored, no formal project management techniques may be needed. In these areas, you should simply use good business management practices. For example, with an internal project whose resource needs consist of three people working for a year, you might forego a written cost estimate or cost controls because the costs would be inherent in the allocation of labor. Using elaborate or even simple cost tracking systems in such a case would be a waste of time and money. The point of project management is not to drive up your overhead or to require mountains of administration. Project management provides a set of structured techniques to help you think about project goals and risks; helps you define, structure, organize, and plan your project; and enables you to effectively monitor and control your project as it progresses toward completion.

The traditional ways of thinking about strategy and how to build advantage are no longer working. Executives need a fresh strategic imagery and analysis of how to cope with the virulent hyper competition and a prescription of how to build advantage in this new environment. How do they do this? Look at Harley Davidsons return to fame from a near collapse. Today, their production lines produce some of the best roadsters. Improved processes, as well as cutting administrative burdens, have done well for the company.

You can buy many things technology, advice, assets, and, often, even time. What you cannot buy is commitment. Commitment is something that is earned and must be won. It is something that must be planned for and managed. The absence of commitment, not the poor selection of technology, is often the primary cause of strategy failure on a project. As hyper competition defines the competitive landscape into the new millennium, the basis of advantage will be the agility of project management methodologies. This important insight must be acted on. This insight ultimately separates the winners from the losers and the successes from the failures.

Why a Project Methodology?

Many companies today do not use any formalized project methodology. They run their businesses as they always have. However, the business and technology landscape is changing rapidly. Business today calls for dynamic methodologies and processes, gearing companies to reinvent themselves so that they can produce products and services faster than ever before. Additionally, being able to produce gadgets of the right quality and specification is key. How does a company change virtually overnight, to become a company that can deliver such gadgets for their clients? Jim Highsmith of Agile Software Development Ecosystems (Addison-Wesley, 2002) states: In a world of constant change, traditional, rigorous software development methods are insufficient for success (p. 22).

The secret to success is the project-based company. With this comes certain provisos: 1.

A set of flexible project management methodologies.

Processes that can be updated to support these methodologies.

Resources that need to be aligned with the methodology.

Business functions that need to support these projects.

If you are not efficient or not getting a quality product developed in time or to specification, you need a new project methodology.

Selling the Project Methodology to the Company

You feel it in your bones. Youre excited about a new project methodology, and youd like to propose this new way of managing projects to your company executives. However, you hesitate to move forward because your neophyte boss, who has a black belt in corporate politics, doesnt like the idea. What should you do?

First, sell the idea to as many people as possible and never give up. It is crucial that companies needing a project or development methodology and all of its associated processes understand that if it doesnt exist, a methodology will have to be developed from scratch, purchased from a third-party vendor, simply obtained from a mutual friend in the business, or tailored from existing processes.

However, before you can do anything, you need to sell the idea to company executives, who are often unfamiliar with project management, especially a new methodology that would affect virtually the entire way their company does business. A typical response to you might be Goodness gracious, are you mad? Weve been doing business like this for years, why change now?

A strong selling point for investing in a solid project methodology is that the greatest return on investment (ROI) lies exactly there. Few people can counsel corporations on how to identify and nurture business drivers such as brilliance, inventiveness, and thought breakthroughs. However, we can make sure that gleaming opportunities are not squandered in their subsequent development and implementation. For innovative ideas to bear fruit, sound project management principles must be followed. Maybe project managers or executives trying to sell the concept to their organizations should emphasize this feature.

Following the success of the Prussian Army in the Franco-Prussian War, the British General staff sent a team of aristocrats to find out the secret of success. They reported that all the Prussian troops were clean-shaven with short-cropped hair. The British Army accordingly copied this. Although there was no evidence that this helped their performance, it remains a law to this day except for special duties. The moral of this story is: You can copy from others but be cautious. Dont copy the wrong thing (i.e., dont copy a methodology if it doesnt meet your needs).

Chapter 2: Project Methodologies Explained

Project Methodology Overview

Key decision makers must often determine whether a universalized project life-cycle methodology is sufficient for all their projects. The answer to that question is an unequivocal no! Very few people are capable of creating a state of-the-art, concisely defined, phenomenally small, highly prescriptive, measurement-intensive, fast, and cost-efficient methodology allowing project managers greater performance improvement (consisting of an expertly designed/optimized family of policies, procedures, plans, specifications, forms, logs, and metrics). Every company has its own process flow diagram. This flow originated from a methodology created to ease implementations of new technologies or new project ideas. These process flow diagrams have many different stages, all similar in nature.

Even dynamic project-based organizations such as Accenture, KPMG, Deloitte Touche, RCG Information Technology, Bechtel, and Keane are far more than a collection of individual projects. If that were all they were, they wouldnt be multimillion-dollar organizations. They all use various arsenals of project methodologies for each solution they undertake. Companies are becoming very much like small film studios. Each project is a movie all by itself and has its own director and script. The movie needs project funding to begin and is short lived; project teams are also short lived, and, amazingly, in this brave new model, they follow a unique project methodology, because if they dont, no one will invest in a movie or project. Therefore, projects need to be innovative, they need process, and they need to adhere to the script or methodology. Each movie script is different from the next; this is where we focus our efforts throughout the book.

By simply assessing those project methodologies that exist today, we see that a universal project approach simply wont work. The main reasons that a single be-all-and-end-all methodology wont work from industry to industry are differences in:

Life cycle.

Market sector.

Product.