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PROJECT PLANNING (CONTD.)
Broad Contents
Identifying Strategic Project Variables
19.1 Identifying Strategic Project Variables:
The project manager must continually monitor the external
environment in order to develop a
well-structured program that can stand up under pressure (for
long-range or strategic projects).
These environmental factors play an integral part in planning.
The project manager must be able
to identify and evaluate these strategic variables in terms of
the future posture of the
organization with regard to constraints on existing resources.
As we know that in the project environment, strategic project
planning is performed at the
horizontal hierarchy level, with final approval by upper-level
management. There are three
basic guidelines for strategic project planning:
• It is extremely
important that upper-level management maintain a close involvement with
project teams, especially during the planning phase.
• Successful
strategic planning must define the authority, responsibility, and roles of the
strategic planning personnel.
• Strategic
project planning is a job that should be performed by managers, not for them.
In order to ensure the success of the project, all members of
the horizontal team must be aware
of those strategic variables that can influence the success or
failure of the project plan. The
analysis begins with the environment, subdivided as internal,
external, and competitive, as
shown below:
- Internal
Environment
- Management skills
- Resources
- Wage and salary levels
- Government freeze on jobs
- Minority groups
- Layoffs
- Sales forecasts
- External
Environment
- Legal
- Political
- Social
- Economic
- Technological
- Competitive Environment
- Industry characteristics
- Company requirements and goals
- Competitive history
- Present competitive activity
- Competitive planning
— Return on investment
— Market share
— Size and variety of product lines
• Competitive
Resources
It is important to note here that once the environmental
variables are defined, the planning
process continues with the following:
- Identification
of company strengths and weaknesses
- Understanding
personal values of top management
- Identification
of opportunities
- Definition of
product market
- Identification
of competitive edge
- Establishment
of goals, objectives, and standards
- Identification
of resource deployment
At the program level, complete identification of all strategic
variables is not easily obtainable.
However, internal, or operating, variables are readily available
to program personnel by virtue
of the structure of the organization. The external variables are
normally tracked under the
perceptive eyes of top management. This presents a challenge for
the organization of the
system. In most cases, those in the horizontal hierarchy of a
program are more interested in the
current operational plan than in external factors and tend to
become isolated from the
environment after the program begins, losing insight into
factors influencing the rapidly
changing external variables in the process. Proper
identification of these strategic variables
requires that communication channels be established between top
management and the project
office.
It is essential that the top-management support must be
available for identification of strategic
planning variables so that effective decision making can occur
at the program level. The
participation of top management in this regard has not been easy
to implement. Many top-level
officers consider this process a relinquishment of some of their
powers and choose to retain
strategic variable identification for the top levels of
management.
It is important to note here that the systems approach to
management does not attempt to
decrease top management's role in strategic decision-making. The
maturity, intellect, and
wisdom of top management cannot be replaced. Ultimately,
decision-making will always rest at
the upper levels of management, regardless of the organizational
structure.
Therefore, identification and classification of the strategic
variables are necessary to establish
relative emphasis, priorities, and selectivity among the
alternatives, to anticipate the
unexpected, and to determine the restraints and limitations of
the program. Universal
classification systems are nonexistent because of the varied
nature of organizations and projects.
However, variables can be roughly categorized as internal and
external, as shown in Table 19.1
below. |