HOBOKEN, N.J. ¯ No organization can survive today without successful projects. From the development of the iPhone to the execution of Boston’s Big Dig, to the recent roll-out of Oracle 11g, projects are the engines that drive innovation from idea to commercialization. But projects are also the drivers that make organizations better, stronger, and more competitive – yet when they fail, it can be devastating.
Traditionally, the success of a project is measured by satisfying the triple constraint: meeting time, budget, and specifications. Once projects are launched, they are greatly detached from changes in the environment, technology, or markets. In their new book, REINVENTING PROJECT MANAGEMENT: The Diamond Approach to Successful Growth and Innovation (Harvard Business School Press, available August 14th), Aaron Shenhar of Stevens Institute of Technology and Dov Dvir of Ben-Gurion University present a new multidimensional model for assessing and planning project success. This Adaptive, Diamond Approach, is based on a success-focused, flexible, and adaptive framework that assumes that projects should be treated as business-related activities and that they must deliver business results.
“In today’s companies, the share of project activities is constantly growing, whereas the percentage of effort devoted to operations is decreasing,” said Shenhar. “Project management – the set of managerial activities needed to lead a project to a successful end – is becoming the next competitive asset and the next significant and unexploited area for achieving excellence and gaining competitive advantage.”
For fifteen years, Shenhar and Dvir have collected data on more than six hundred projects in the business, government, and nonprofit sectors around the world. While 85 percent of these projects failed to meet time and budget goals, the most important question remains unanswered: How do projects contribute to the organization’s success and effectiveness"
REINVENTING PROJECT MANAGEMENT presents new success criteria for planning and assessing project success beyond the triple constraint. They involve at least five dimensions, or metrics:
- Project efficiency: meeting time and budget goals
- Impact on the customer: meeting requirements and achieving customer satisfaction, benefits, and loyalty
- Impact on the team: satisfaction, retention, and personal growth
- Business results: return on investment, market share, and growth
- Preparation for the future: new technologies, new markets, and new capabilities
The Diamond Framework helps managers distinguish among projects according to four dimensions (or bases): novelty, technology, complexity, and pace (NTCP). The diamond provides a disciplined tool for analyzing the expected benefits and risks of a project.
The four bases of the Diamond are as follows:
- Novelty. Represents the uncertainty of the project’s goal, the uncertainty in the market, or both. It measures how new the projects’ product is to customers, users, or to the market in general.
- Technology. This base represents the project’s level of technological uncertainty. It is determined by how much new technology is required to complete the project.
- Complexity. Measures the complexity of the product, the task, and the project organization.
- Pace. This base represents the urgency of the project – namely, how much time there is to complete the job.
The Diamond Approach helps managers and project teams make the right assessment before presenting their project proposals to top management, shows executives how to ask the right questions and foresee danger before they make a commitment to a project, and guides project teams in adapting their project management style to the circumstances, environment, and task for better business results and more project home runs.
Shenhar and Dvir draw from a wealth of global project management experience that spans many industries, companies, and projects. Their case studies include the Sydney Opera House, Sony, BMW, Pixar, NASA, Denver International Airport, Segway, Toy Story, and Hurricane Katrina. They also show how the diamond framework applies to a telecommunication network collaboration project, the commercialization of flash memory, and the development of a military fire and control system.
The final chapters of the book provide specific ways on how to implement the Diamond Approach on top of the traditional approach in an existing organization, and provide guidelines for executives on how to reinvent project management for their entire organization.
REINVENTING PROJECT MANAGEMENT provides a new highly flexible and adaptive model for approving, planning, and managing projects. It offers a new language and roadmap that managers and teams can use to plan, communicate, and make decisions about projects to achieve superior business results.
About the Authors
Aaron J. Shenhar is the Institute Professor of Management and the founder of the Project Management Program at Stevens Institute of Technology. Dov Dvir is the head of the Management Department at Ben Gurion University in Israel.
About Stevens Institute of Technology
Founded in 1870, Stevens Institute of Technology is one of the leading technological universities in the world dedicated to learning and research. Through its broad-based curricula, nurturing of creative inventiveness, and cross disciplinary research, the Institute is at the forefront of global challenges in engineering, science, and technology management. Partnerships and collaboration between, and among, business, industry, government and other universities contribute to the enriched environment of the Institute. A new model for technology commercialization in academe, known as Technogenesis®, involves external partners in launching business enterprises to create broad opportunities and shared value. Stevens offers baccalaureates, master’s and doctoral degrees in engineering, science, computer science and management, in addition to a baccalaureate degree in the humanities and liberal arts, and in business and technology. The university has a total enrollment of 1,850 undergraduate and 2,980 graduate students, and a worldwide online enrollment of 2,250, with a full-time tenured or tenure-track faculty of 140 and more than 200 full-time special faculty. Stevens’ graduate programs have attracted international participation from China, India, Southeast Asia, Europe and Latin America. Additional information may be obtained from its web page at www.stevens.edu. For the latest news about Stevens, please visit www.StevensNewsService.com.