Project Management In A Competitive Environment

Introduction

Consideration of projects is inevitable in business operation in a competitive environment. Pursuit profit or market share, the for improving efficiency and effectiveness require changes. These changes can be achieved through properly implemented projects. Cleland (1994) found that running projects are clear signs of the presence of a change in an organization.

A project is a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product, service or result (PMI 2017a):

- temporality means a definite start and end time of the set of tasks,

- uniqueness means a new level of performance,

- endeavor means work efforts and costs related to the tasks.

The characteristics and the limitations in time and cost of a project raise the need for

Considering that each project is individual and project management experiences can only be gained in practice, raison d'etre of project management seems superfluous at first sight. Of course, a theoretical description or only presenting good examples is not enough. Project management education and training shall develop project management competencies, i.e. enable the future project managers to solve the potential problems of any aspects.

Problem formulation

2.1 Concept of project management

However, the basic concept of project management is relatively uniform, literature dealing with project management shows a varied picture including the designations and the highlighted points. A great example is the naming of project management processes also known as phases, process groups or project lifecycle. There are two relevant standards about project management dividing these processes into five groups but with slightly different names (Table *). Verzuh (2005) defines four phases of the project lifecycle with the same content as the standards.

ISO 21500 PMBOK Verzuh

Initiating Initiating Define

Planning Planning

Corporations, professional institutions, consultancies, and universities realized this, and the importance of a trained project manager and organized training or special programs to improve their knowledge (see Nemeslaki, 1995). However, the backbones of the education programs have been defined about 20 years ago, the understanding of projects and project management has changed largely during the time elapsed. IT support has evolved remarkably (highly integrated software background, the spread of ERP systems, collaboration through the internet) and new project management concepts (primarily agile approach) must be mentioned. All of these require both the redesign of training programs and the evaluation of the effectiveness of the programs. According to Wateridge (1997) or Lee-Kelly and Blackman (2011), the program shall