How project management enables strategic management in a company.
The strategic plan objectives of an organization often require significant transformations for the company to be able to achieve them.
From small-scale sectoral transformations to larger expansions, such as the creation of new departmental or manufacturing units. To achieve this, organizations require projects and their adequate management so that global objectives are met.
According to Guilherme Barbassa, the business management model generally has two main pillars or foundations: operational process management, which is the management of the company's day-to-day operations; and project management from the company that are the main drivers of change, that is, structural changes supported by corporate projects.
Cláudio Bastos Boaventura, Business and Projects Manager at Stratec, believes that all projects associated with an organization are, in theory, important and should add value; otherwise, they have no reason to exist. “From the simplest to the most complex, their importance must be adequately highlighted to avoid mistakes of creating projects without significant value for the organization's current situation, especially those classified as strategic,” he emphasizes.
“When we talk about strategic management, we are talking about major organizational changes to occupy a certain strategic position in the market or to strengthen the current position. Project management is what will ensure effectiveness in carrying out these projects, which in turn aim for change and therefore support the company's strategy management,” explains Barbassa.
According to Bastos, leading a strategic and complex project to success is much more than simply stating that the organization advocates methodology “A” or “B”, or that it has a “blue”, “red” or “yellow” project office, phrases that many organizations are “proud” to say. For him, managing a project of great importance requires the organization to be prepared to frequently monitor indicators and, if necessary, also be able to align the project's path if it goes off course. “Many organizations today still delude themselves into thinking that the success of a project is to hand over a set of activities to a person with a “magic wand” who will be called the “project manager”, without worrying about whether there is adequate planning and a monitoring and control plan compatible with the complexity of the project in question, so that risks can be identified and resolved. Without this, all that remains is to place the blame on the “magic wand”, but as it is an imaginary element, the blame always falls on the person who has been appointed “project manager”,’ he jokes.
Bastos further complements by stating that managing a project is an equation composed of several important variables, such as having adequate planning, the involvement of people committed to a “positive outcome” (sponsor, project manager, and associated teams), in addition to tools that facilitate monitoring, control, and communication of performance indicators. Of these three key components mentioned, we can say that the first two are strongly influenced by the culture of the project's sponsoring organization and by the talent and commitment of the people involved.
The Strategic Management software, developed by Stratec, aids in operational management by utilizing common project management methodologies, critical path definition, budget and responsibility management, as well as a comprehensive system for controlling project activity execution. Barbassa highlights the ability to scale alerts for activities, indicating who is responsible for each action, tracking project progress, and evaluating their operational management. It also allows for visualizing the relationships between projects, prioritizing them, and automatically generating project effectiveness and efficiency indicators, such as the S-curve, among others.
Cláudio further emphasizes that GE software enables the control and communication of goals from various perspectives, from the most traditional timeline, through the scope with its final product, to allocated costs and risks. “The manager can create and monitor not just one, but several performance indicators for project monitoring and control,” he attests.
