If you’ve worked in the corporate world at all, you’ve heard the term “project management”. At its most basic level, you probably understand it to encompass the process of organizing the many factors that go into taking a given project from inception to completion. This could mean receiving instructions from a client, creating a plan for the necessary resources and scheduling, commencing work and tracking and readjusting actions along the way to deal with changes or setbacks.
This is the bare bones of traditional project management, which operates with a bottom-up mentality and it sounds pretty simple. Unfortunately, the focus on task completion may come at the expense of providing value, both for clients and for your company. While normal project management is entirely suitable for small projects, the dynamic starts to shift the larger and more complex the project becomes, until the entire process is hopelessly mired in bureaucracy.
This is a disaster for enterprise. Large corporations have large projects and they need solutions that are going to make project management effective and efficient. This is where enterprise project management enters the picture. What is it and how does it differ from traditional operations? Here’s what you need to know about enterprise vs. traditional project management.
What is Enterprise Project Management?
There are really three essential components to enterprise project management. First and foremost, this type of project management requires strategic planning at the corporate level. While standard project management may allow managers and teams to chart their course within loose parameters, the enterprise mentality is a centralized function of the business as a whole. It consists of a set of clearly defined operational guidelines to govern all projects, regardless of scale. This is aligned with the overall goals and strategy of the organization.
Secondly, a premium is placed on value creation. When teams get bogged down in the day-to-day tasks of a project, it can become difficult to see the forest for the trees. In addition, the fragmented nature of traditional project management allows different teams to define value differently, making for inconsistent output.
Finally, there are the different tools used for the different kinds of project management, which we’ve written further about here. The scope and complexity of larger projects demand scalable tools. Creating processes and guidelines that are in keeping with the strategies and values of the company is essential, but practical implementation requires robust tools that are up to the task.
Benefits of Enterprise vs. Traditional Project Management
The greatest benefit of choosing the enterprise model for project management is that it is transitional. Once a system has been implemented within an organization, it can be used across departments, working just as well in marketing and sales as in the HR and IT departments and it should scale seamlessly based on project size.
When your company is able to align project management with overall strategy and take advantage of tools like Clarizen’s cloud-based project management software, there should be no barriers to achieving effective, efficient and consistent value regardless of the size and scope of a project.
