Page 227 - Global Project Management Handbook

11-2 COMPETENCY FACTORS IN PROJECT MANAGEMENT
11-2
COMPETENCY FACTORS IN PROJECT MANAGEMENT
integrative functions. The ideal project-oriented organization is considered a flat organiza-
tion with a specific project management culture (Gareis, 2004). Use of the organization,
whether a line organization to carry out a business process or a project or program, creates
competitive advantage. The development from a classic managed organization to a project-
oriented organization can be considered to be a paradigm shift.
While traditional human resources management processes and practices (Wright and
Boswell, 2002) are designed for the classically managed organization—for the organization
that mass produces routine products or services and where the job requirements are well
defined and stable (Keegan and Turner, 2003)—the project-oriented company is confronted
with specific challenges:
● Temporarity. Projects and programs are temporary organizations (Turner and
Müller, 2003; Gareis, 2005). Thus every time a new project or program is started,
the human resources configuration of the organization must change.
● More dynamic. Project-oriented companies have dynamic boundaries and contexts.
The number and size of the projects performed are constantly changing, permanent and
temporary resources are employed, and cooperation with clients, partners, and suppliers
is organized in teams, some of them are virtual (Gareis, 2004). Projects are considered
as temporary organizations to bring change (Turner and Müller, 2003). Thus projects
and programs entail greater uncertainty, creating a more dynamic environment with
more discontinuity.
● Project portfolio. At a certain point in time a project-oriented organization holds a project
portfolio of different internal and external project types (PMI, 2004; Gareis, 2005). This
means that more or fewer projects and programs are carried out at the same time. A person
has multiple roles. A person can work on different projects at the same time, maybe even in
different project roles. In one project, he or she is a project manager; in another project,
he or she is a project team member. Or a person can carry a role in a project and at the
same time carry another role in the permanent organization, for example, in the project
management office. Consequences are challenges in the multiple resource allocation
(Eskerod, 1998).
● Specific project management culture and management paradigm. The ideal project-
oriented company has a specific project management culture expressed in the empow-
erment of employees, process orientation and teamwork, continuous and discontinuous
organizational change, customer orientation, and networking with clients and suppliers

(Gareis, 2004). Therefore, specific competencies and skills are needed by the project
management personnel to work together successfully in projects.
Thus human resource management needs to be designed to meet the needs of the
project-oriented organization (Huemann et al., 2005). This has not yet been widely acknowl-
edged, except from the multiproject resource-allocation perspective (Eskerod, 1998;
Hendriks et al., 1999). While the organizational project management maturity model
(OPM3), developed by the Project Management Insitute (PMI, 2003), does not consider
managing project management personnel, the maturity model for the project-oriented
company (mm-poc) developed by the Projektmanagement Group of the Vienna
University of Economics and Business Administration does (Gareis, 2004). The mm-poc
recognizes the importance of personnel management in the project-oriented company as
one of the dimensions in the spider-web presentation of the model (Fig. 11.1). Based on
this model, the Projektmanagement Group of the Vienna University of Economics and
Business Administration has analyzed and benchmarked 60 project-oriented organiza-
tions from different industries (see Chap. 22).
In the maturity model for the project-oriented company (mm-poc), the dimension
“personnel management in the project-oriented company” includes