Projects + Management = Project-Management

Patanakul, Peerasit; Milosevic, Dragan: The effectiveness in managing a group of multiple projects: Factors of influence and measurement criteria; in: International Journal of Project Management, in press, corrected proof.http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijproman.2008.03.001Update: This article has been published inInternational Journal of Project Management, Vol. 27 (2009), pp. 216–233. Multi-project management. I covered a similar topic yesterday looking at it from a Complexity Theory viewpoint. The authors argue that multi-project management is increasingly used in the industry mainly for reasons of better utilisation. [Having worked as a multi-project manager for marketing projects back in the old days, I don’t know if that is really true. My projects always culminated in a week with crazy workload, followed by dry spells, where I bored myself to death.]Patanakul & Milosevic analyse the critical success factors for managing multi-projects from a ‚bundle of projects‘-perspective, i.e., by interviewing a multi-project manager and his/her supervisor. Thus they build six case studies of organisations using multi-project-management. Accordingly the authors define multi-project as the middle state in the project continuum, where single projects are on one end, and programmes are on the other end of the scale.What do Patankul & Milosevic find? The antecedents of multi-project management effectiveness are

• Organisational field
  • Project assignments
    • Projects‘ strategic importance
    • Required fit to managers‘ competencies
    • Organisational & personal limitations
  • Resource allocation
    • Sufficient resource allocation
    • Sustainable resource allocation
  • Organisational culture
    • Commitment
    • Communication
    • Teamwork
    • Rewards
• Operational field
  • Project management processes
    • Individual processes
    • Inter-project processes
    • Interdependency management
  • Competencies of the multi-project manager
    • Competencies for leading individual projects
    • Competencies for coordinating between projects

Finally the authors identify the consequences of multi-project management effectiveness as

• Organisation
  • Resource productivity
  • Organisational learning
• Project
  • Time-to-Market
  • Customer satisfaction
• Personal
  • Personal growth
  • Personal satisfaction

This entry was posted on Freitag, Oktober 3rd, 2008 at 08:36 and is filed under Case Study, Complexity, Critical Success Factors, Leadership, Multi-project management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.