Selling Project Management to Executives
Project management is plays a crucial role in company growth. It helps companies to have the progress of their company projects supervised from their inception to their completion. Accepting project management tactics enables companies to run their projects on time, with minimal disruption and at minimum cost. Project managers gain expertise in dealing with unique projects and delivering on them. Without the project manager, the entire company must at all times suffer continuous disruptions during the progress of the project. Project management stems this problem hence making the company more productive. This paper intends to analyse the case of Levon Corporation, a company that almost collapses as the executive is reluctant to adopt project management. It looks at the various problems that are associated with project management and how best to address the issue of adopting project management to executives. Adoption of project management also helps to increase the credibility of a company as to whether it is going to deliver on projects.
Levon Corporation has issues of credibility when trying to get projects from its customers. This was especially as a result of the failure of the company to embrace project management which would show the willingness and ability of the company to handle big projects and deliver on time. The executives were reluctant listening to the sales and marketing personnel on various grounds. First, they might have thought that a completely neutral opinion was required in determining whether or not do adopt project management. This is because project management would lead to benefits on certain members of the company. Secondly, this is an issue that required to be researched on and a valid reason be given for its adoption. This is because the company would require investing on that department and so it required going slow on it. Finally, they needed to have a clear plan on the how the new department would be managed so as to prevent it from causing disagreements within the company.
Even after the research, the company still remained apprehensive on various grounds. First, the research had not provided a clear guideline on how the new division would be managed without disrupting the power balance that was being experienced in the company. Secondly, the company would require setting aside some funds to run it. This would come in the form of employing new employees and training project managers.
A consultant should try to sell project management to executives on different levels. First, he needs to identify the importance of the new department to the company. At this point, he needs to identify the problems the company undergoes for lack of project management. He also needs to identify how much better companies that are using project management are doing. This is as far as the consultant in the case study went. The consultant also needed to identify why the executives were reluctant in adopting the new idea and solve it. In this case, he needed to identify a way in which all executives would be involved in overseeing the department in such a way that the power would not be eroded from some executives and sent to others. Finally, the company needed to show the executives that creating the new department would cut costs on the company or that it would increase the company profits.
In conclusion, the consultant used the first strategy of selling the idea to the executives but not the other two. The executives actually knew the importance of this department beforehand but needed to know how to deal with the constraints that came with it. He required showing them how important this department would be to each of them so that it would be accepted.
