Project professionals
Issue 28 - Mar 07

Project management is a skill companies value highly. Across the world trained effective project managers are increasingly in high demand. RFP recently spoke to executives from the global
Project Management Institute about why understanding good
project management methodology should be a priority for us all..

Linda Vella, Chair, PMI and Gregory Balestrero, CEO, PMI are well aware that of the millions of square feet of forecasted real estate projects and the billions of
dollars to be spent on infrastructure projects in China alone entire armies of experienced project managers will be required. This is why they are in Asia, where
some of the world’s most spectacular projects are under way, promoting their institute and their professional designations, such as the PMP (Project Management Professional), to individuals and companies across Asia
while attending the PMI Asia Annual Summit.

However, most of their members are not involved in the sectors that make up the industry surrounding the built environment. In fact not even twenty percent. Some
consider that this might be a problem, as the complexity and uncertainty that goes with some of these projects requires hands on experience. As one speaker at a conference recently put it, “it’s not enough just to throw a PMP at it, you need someone who’s been there before”. Yet Vella thinks that they still have something very useful to offer, after all the PMI handbook, or PMBOK, as it is known, is used across all sectors of their membership, is the fourth best selling book on Amazon and PMI have shifted two million copies globally.

Balestrero does come from an industry that deals with the built environment, an industrial engineer who has previously served as the executive director of the Constructions Specifi cations Institute. He believes there are enormous opportunities for all members of the industry to improve their knowledge of how project management really works. Balestero says that for a company, effective project management is all about reducing cost or increasing revenue. No project is undertaken without there being some dollar related objective, he argues, and if the project does not meet those goals, the chances are the problem lies in the way the project is being managed.

For example, he says, a company may introduce a new lighting system or a green airconditioning unit in order to save costs on electricity. If there is no way to measure the cost of the project verses the amount saved then the project has not met its anticipated outcome. Therefore, before even beginning, the project must be managed with the goals in mind at each step along the way. What PMI offers are these tools, to individuals and companies, so that they are not forced to repeat the same mistakes or reinvent a project process that someone else has already spent time on.

Vella said that this is the reason project managers are now in such high demand,
companies are seeing that if a project is managed well, their costs for new initiatives reduce and the amount of revenue they generate is realised faster. This point was reinforced in a recent advertising campaign that PMI ran in Forbes magazine, rather than targeting the project managers themselves it featured a series of CEOs talking about how effective project management was valuable for them.

It is this realisation that has also prompted the growth in membership of institutes such as PMI which has seen membership grow 23 percent in 2004 and 41 percent in 2005, with total membership at 200,000 at the end of 2005. PMI predicts that in the next three years China alone will require 600,000 well-trained project management practitioners and some 100,000 certifi ed professionals to meet surging demand. Vella noted that almost 100 engineering departments in Chinese universities have opened project management masters courses which should go some of the way to fi lling that need and “project” was the second most used word in China’s most recent fi ve year plan. No longer can people arrive in Asia, slap on the title of project manager and get started with a couple of Excel sheets. Project management is rapidly becoming a profession, where CEOs are quickly able to identify those who are out of their depth.

As project management began with the building industry, people in this industry have something of an advantage. But other sectors are catching up fast and people working within the building industry should look into the trend towards cross industry growth and the opportunities for effective project management in all areas of their operations. Software implementation, change management programmes and bench marking initiatives can all benefi t from the knowledge of effective project management.

PMI breaks down project knowledge into nine knowledge
areas:
• Project Integration Management
• Project Scope Management
• Project Time Management
• Project Cost Management
• Project Quality Management
• Project Human Resource Management
• Project Communications Management
• Project Risk Management
• Project Procurement Management.

These individual areas are then further subdivided. For example Project Risk
Management subdivides into risk management planning, risk identification,
qualitative risk analysis, quantitative sisk analysis, risk response planning, and risk
monitoring and control. There are also adjuncts to the guides for PMs in specific areas such, there is a building and construction extension guide that shows how each of these principles and documentation applies specifically to that industry. For example, in construction the term“building commissioning” signifying the end of a building project parallels with what the PMBOK guide refers to as “project closure”. The idea, says Vella, is to develop consistent methodologies that
are specific to that industry. She views the PMBOK outline as being like the windows operating system, it is a basis upon which a number of softwares, or in the case of PM, industries, can function.

A good example in China of where effective PM methodology improved a project is in the“phenomenal” Three Gorges Dam project, says Balestrero. During stage one it was managed much like other Chinese projects and suffered the same problems with ethics, poor safety standards and quality control, seen in many other Chinese building and infrastructure projects. During stage two, managers introduced some of PMI’s principles and the safety issues were reduced,
the schedule came up to speed and the budget was brought under control.

PM professionalism is vital: so much so that in South Africa construction project
managers must be licensed before taking the title, this is because they may be held legally accountable for building safety in the same way that engineers or architects can. While this is not yet the case in Asia, with PMs gaining more power and control over decision making on site, it will pay to get professional fast. RFP

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