Project Management is, in my opinion, the single most important skill people willing to work in for-profit or not companies should acquire.

The corporate world is not complicated, it is complex i.e. difficult to represent graphically. Therefore, people should learn how to deal with all the departments of a company. The widely spread word to explain such a trend is “transversality”.

Project Management doesn´t necessarily mean “to manage a project” but to integrate best within a specific teamworking environment supposed to deliver a defined service or product before a deadline, provided resources constraints.

Project Management is still a young discipline (although the Project Management Institute I´ve just subscribed to is everyday more and more recognized), primarily born in the construction industry, and structured in the IT spheres during the last decade.

Look at these frightening figures: “According to Maxfield, 74% [of all projects] come in over budget, 82% miss deadlines, 79% fail to meet quality or functional specifications, and 67% result in damaged team morale.” (source: ComputerWorld) As I see it, projects mainly fail for political reasons or lack of resources.

You must probably be thinking “Jeremy´s fool. Why would companies switch to project structures if project management gives such crappy results?”. Well, projects fail because organizations are not project management-focused.

See the chart on the right (sorry, it´s in Spanish. I live in Spain, think in Spanish,..). This is how most companies operate, through departmental and divisional structures. Marketing and Finance spend their time fighting instead of working towards improving business processes; Sales and Production departments can´t be blamed for not getting along well: when sales go up, production people work harder; when sales go down, production people need to justify increased inventories and hence a higher working capital, etc. Examples are countless!

I believe the traditional way to organize a company should die. And the quicker the better. Today, young and less young professionals want to get the big picture of the organization they work hard for. People want to interact with people that are different: different cultures (look at Microsoft, the United Nations, or INSEAD, three successful organizations. it´s the zoo there; different people, colors, backgrounds, etc.), & most of all different domains of expertise. Bring purchase, supply chain, IT, finance, marketing & sales people all together in one team; give them responsibilities, a well-defined deliverable, flexible deadline & budget, make sure someone takes leadership of the group. Monitor the advancement of the project and check regularly that a corporate mentor (a senior executive) visit them and provides relevant advice. See the results for yourself: your team will feel empowered, since all its team members will be learning from each other.

In the short-run, everything won´t be perfect, but you´ll notice the difference after a few years: less turnover, better people that their organization is a learning one (provided that executive management set up the right Knowledge Management tools eg Intranet, Virtual Experiences Exchange platform, Feedbacks, etc.).

The best way to learn about the best project management practices is certainly to benefit from IT people´s numerous insights – IT people suffer from most organization´s lack of Project Management acumen. Most of today´s best organizations in Project Management are technology-driven (Cegelec, Microsoft, HP, IBM, Business Objects, GE – to name a few. But I´d be glad if my readership could provide us with more insights about the best PM organizations). I wish companies from other industries start taking to Project Management-oriented organizational structures; one gateway to such a change could be e-Business implementation, that implies having different corporate departments working together. I wish…

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