Authors: Asare Bediako1 Adams, Lewis Billy Bonsu2 & Dr. David Ackah,PhD.3
Regional Prog. Coordinator1, Director2, President3, Institute of Project Management Professionals (IPMP)1&3 Graduate Entrepreneurship & Business Incubation Centre2
email: adams.asare@ipmp-edu.org1 createcon@yahoo.com2 & drackah@ipmp.edu.gh3
INTRODUCTION
Projects create productive assets. It is only through projects resources are converted into productive assets. Since projects convert resources that lie idle into productive assets, projects act as prime movers of economic development of any country. In the process of creating productive assets, projects optimize the process of resource allocation. Since projects can be successfully completed only with a focused attention on goals by the project team members, projects create an environment for participatory endeavours. Project Management Institute (PMI) commissioned a comprehensive research study to assess the project leadership style as a success factor on project performance (Turner and Müller, 2005). Turner and Müller—after reviewing general management literature on leadership starting from Confucius (500 BC) and Barnard (1938) to Dulewicz and Higgs (2003)—noted, based on several research studies, that leadership style and competence are key success factors to a manager’s business performance; however, they did not find such correlation in the project management literature. Nonetheless, Turner and Müller suggested that different project leadership styles are appropriate at different stages of the project life cycle, and the project manager has a leadership role in creating an effective working environment for the project team.
From the point of view of an organization, projects act as a means for consolidating the experience and expertise of the organizational members effectively, create learning environment, encourage team-spirit and help to achieve organizational objectives (Nagarajan, 2012). Business becoming more and more competitive, the focus of organizations shift towards ensuring customer satisfaction. This can be achieved by cutting down costs, improving quality, improving product features and ensuring timely delivery. Though mass-production has its advantages in terms of cost reduction, when every player in the field switches over to mass-production has its advantages in terms of cost reduction, the cost differences between organizations get narrowed down. To win over the situation, there needs to be a shift towards custom production of products and services to meet the specific customer requirements of different sector of customers. Such a situation will necessarily require a team-based approach to issues where in ‘project management’ becomes the only option. Factory automation and office automation cuts down the lengthy organizational hierarchy and reduces the need for middle management and supervisory staff considerably. Instead, employees are assigned with more and more of specific problems like improving product features, designing new products, finding out cost-effective techniques of production etc. All such specific time-bound issues can be effectively handled only by project based organizations. As an organization starts handling more of projects (which are necessitated by the changing business scenario as explained above), the bureaucratic organizational set up where project teams will be formed to execute specific projects; once the project execution is over, the team will be dissolved and a fresh team will be formed to handle a new project and so on. Thus, handling organizational activities as a combination of many projects have come to stay.
