What Is the Value of Project Management?

As operating environment for most organizations continues to become more global, more competitive, and more demanding, organizations must adapt. They must become more efficient, more productivethey must "do more with less." They must continually innovate. They must respond rapidly to a fast-changing environment. How can they do this? How can they do this in a strategic manner? How can they do this and still have the proper management controls? They can do this with effective project management. The strategic value points that effective project management can offer an organization include the following:

• Provides a controlled way to rapidly respond to changing market conditions and new strategic opportunities
• Maximizes the innovative and creative capabilities of the organization by creating environments of focus and open communication
• Allows organization to accomplish more with less costs
• Enables better leverage of both internal and external expertise
• Provides key information and visibility on project metrics to enable better management decision-making
• Increases the pace and level of stakeholder acceptance for any strategic change
• Reduces financial losses by "killing off" poor project investments early in their life cycles

In addition to providing apparent value to any organization, project management also offers tremendous value to each of us as individuals. At a personal level, the value of effective project management

• Ensures that our work is put to the best use for the organization and properly recognized
• Provides a career path that offers unique, challenging opportunities on each new project
• Provides a career path that requires all of our abilities and knowledge, including our management, business, people, and technical skills
• Provides a career path that is high in demand, and generally, an increase in income
• Provides a career path that prepares you for organizational leadership positions
• Provides a career path that is recognized more each year as excellent preparation for CxO positions (as more CxO positions are filled by individuals with project management experience)
• Provides a career path that allows you to be on the front lines of strategic organizational initiatives and have major impact on the organization's future