INNOVATION AND PROJECT MANAGEMENT

Slack & Brandon-Jones – Ch 19

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• Clearly defined goals
• Competent project manager
• Top-management support
• Competent project team members
• Sufficient resource allocation
• Adequate communications channels
• Control mechanisms
• Feedback capabilities
• Responsiveness to clients
• Troubleshooting mechanisms
• Project staff continuity
• background and experience which are consistent with the needs of the
project;
• leadership and strategic expertise, in order to maintain an understanding of
the overall project and its environment, while at the same time working on
the details of the project;
• technical expertise in the area of the project in order to make sound
technical decisions;
• interpersonal competence and the people skills to take on such roles as
project champion, motivator, communicator, facilitator and politician;
• proven managerial ability in terms of a track record of getting things done.
 The project environment comprises all the factors which
may affect the project during its life.
Environmental factors can be considered under the following
four headings:
Geo-social environment – geographical, climatic and cultural
factors that may affect the project.
Stage 1 – Econo-political environment – the economic, governmental
Understanding the and regulatory factors in which the project takes place.
Project Environment The business environment – industrial, competitive, supply
network and customer expectation factors that shape the likely
objectives of the project.
The internal environment – the individual company’s strategy
and culture, the resources available and the interaction with
other projects that will influence the project.
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 Three different elements define a project:
its objectives: the end state that project management
is trying to achieve;
Stage 2 –
Project Definition its scope: the exact range of the responsibilities taken
on by project management;
its strategy: how project management is going to meet
its objectives.
• Project objectives can be judged in terms of the five
performance objectives – quality, speed, dependability,
flexibility and cost. Or cost, time, and quality.
• Clarifying objectives involves breaking down project
objectives into three categories – the purpose, the end
results, and the success criteria.
• The scope of a project identifies its work content and its
products or outcomes. It is a boundary-setting exercise which
attempts to define the dividing line between what each part
of the project will do and what it won’t do.
• Project strategy defines how the project is going to meets its
objectives: by defining the phases of the project and by
setting milestones and/or ‘stagegates’.

• Milestones are important events during the project’s life.

• Stagegates are the decision points that allow the project to
move on to its next phase.
 The planning process fulfils four distinct purposes:
It determines the cost and duration of the project. This
enables major decisions to be made – such as the decision
Stage 3 – whether to go ahead with the project at the start.
Project Planning It determines the level of resources which will be needed.
It helps to allocate work and to monitor progress. Planning
must include the identification of who is responsible for what.
It helps to assess the impact of any changes to the project.
The process of project planning involves five steps:

Identify activities
Most projects are too complex to be planned and controlled effectively unless they are first
broken down into manageable portions.
Estimate times and resources
Without some idea of how long each part of a project will take and how many resources it
will need, it is impossible to define what should be happening at any time during the
execution of the project.
Identify relationships and dependencies
Some activities will, by necessity, need to be executed in a particular order.
Identify schedule constraints
Resource-constrained & Time-constrained
Fix the schedule
Project planners should ideally have a number of alternatives to choose from. The one
which best fits project objectives can then be chosen or developed.
Critical path method (CPM)
A technique of network
analysis which models the
project by clarifying the
relationships between
activities diagrammatically.

Critical path
The longest sequence of
activities through a project
network, it is called the
critical path because any
delay in any of its activities
will delay the whole project.
 It involves five key challenges:
how to monitor the project in order to check on its progress;
how to assess the performance of the project by comparing
monitored observations of the project with the project plan;
how to intervene in the project in order to make the changes
Stage 5 – that will bring it back to plan.
Project Control
how to manage matrix tensions in the project in order to
reconcile the interests of both the project and different
organizational functions;
how to learn from the project in order to improve
performance in subsequent projects
Crashing networks
The process of reducing
time spans on critical path
activities so that the project
is completed in less time.
Usually, crashing activities
incurs extra cost.
This can be as a result of:

• overtime working;
• additional resources,
such as manpower;
• sub-contracting.