ABSTRACT
Conclusion Despite having been around, with most of its techniques and benefits, for more than half a century, traditional project management is still largely ignored. The only exceptions are in those industries and applications where either it is mandated, such as NASA or U.S. Department of Defense projects, or where its value is overwhelmingly clear, such as nuclear power and refinery outages where the delay cost that can be computed easily is often in excess of $1 million a day. However, the vast majority of the business world still either ignores the techniques or uses them in an informal and nonsystematic way that drains the wholistic methodology of much of its potential benefit. (As one senior manager said once during a client conference: “What we really need here as project managers is a bunch of Alpha male dogs.” The facial expression of the only woman present caused some of the other men in the room to add hurriedly: “Or Alpha female dogs.” But the message was clear-methodology was considered less important than testosterone.)
So if even traditional project management has struggled to establish itself in the corporate world, why should Total Project Control (TPC) have any better luck? The answer is because TPC is tied to what is really important to the organization: value and profit. Even in nonprofit organizations, there are divergent values among the various projects. How should one judge between them? The resources that are assigned to them are paid for in dollars. If we decide to pay more for resources on one project than another, aren’t we automatically suggesting that one is “worth” more dollars than the other? No matter what the value system is that generates the two projects?
