Benefits of project management – Project management contributes value to organizations

Written By: Mateusz Jasny on July 23, 2008 No Comment

Last month I tried to answer the following question: “how to win people to project management, and show the value provided by project management”. While writing article doubts appeared, how can anyone be sure that project management contribute any value?

Last week I got an answer to that question.

The conference “PMI Research Conference, 2008″, held in Warsaw, presented the results of four years-research. In their presentation, “Researching the value of Project Management” – Janice L. Thomas and Mark Mullaly presented the results of the research carried out at 65 organizations worldwide.

The reasearch have confirmed that project management creates value for business and it is seen more clearly in organizations where the project management process is more mature.

There’re more organizations who can see intangibles benefits than tangible ones. None of the organizations surveyed measure ROI (or intends to) on project management, and therefore it can be assumed that the world hasn’t gone mad and does not attempt to measure everything (in my opinion expressing of all the benefits of organizational changes in monetary value can be called “creative financial engineering”).

So what are the main benefits of project management (what do people say)?

- Project management helps people to think in a creative way.

- It improves communication within the organisation

- Projects are better aligned with the strategy.

- We can ask more money for our projects

- Project managers better sell our additional services

The research provides also practices that help / hinder the effective introduction of project management in the organisation.

For example, best practices include: identifying the owner responsible for the implementation of project management; all interested parties should know the benefits of project management.

The practices which should be avoided, for example: overimplementation, conflicting objectives set to the project management by project functional managers; forcing management projects without prior education.

More details can be found in the video recording of the conference.

Find out more here:

Tags: benefits of project mangement, conference, pmi, Project Management, project management benefits, project managemtnt benefits, value, value of project management