In general, organizational practices for execution of projects (project management practices) are inclined a) towards central control by parent organization, b) towards limited view of project as tool to execute complex work for parent organization and c) towards achievement of project output (rather than achieving strategic outcome for parent organization).
It is observed that the Project Management practices have tendency to assure organization-centric fiscal discipline and have a bias towards risk-free implementation of projects. Usually such practices assume that projects can be planned to perfection and also assume that the environment under which projects execute remain static (with respect to initial plan) throughout the life-cycle of the projects. Practices view projects as a whole to be comprising of smaller parts (chunks of work). It is assumed that in all circumstances the project (whole) can be swiftly broken in to parts and after execution, output of all the parts can easily be reassembled as a whole to produce project output (in a perfectly synchronized manner).
Thus, in view of the above, project management practices are usually framed to exert restrictive control on projects. Karlos Artto et al ("What is project strategy?”, 2008) observed “Existing research using the project strategy concept mostly assumes that there is one strong parent organization for a project; indeed, the parent is assumed to dictate an image of its strategy to the project, and the project is assumed to take an obedient servant’s role, to serve as a tactical vehicle that becomes a mere part of its parent organization and the parent’s strategic scheme.”
But, many times adherence to organizational project practices squeeze the project orientation just to execution of a defined scope under classical Barnes Constraints of time, cost and quality (Barnes, 1969) with the limited objective to generate the quantified outputs. The restrictive practices resist re-adjustment, re-alignment and re-adaption required by the project (during execution) to take the project towards achievement of desirable outcome and eventually end up limiting the project just to a previously planned output.
Such restrictive organizational project management practices may (at the best) be appropriate for implementing projects intended to execute some moderately complex task for the organization but NOT for projects intended to support strategic initiatives or innovative initiative or tasks involving complexity of multi discipline expertise.
In this regards, it may be noted that a project is an endeavour to create unique result (6th Edition PMBOK® Guide, PMI—Chapter 1). However, if this endeavour (the project) is subjected to restrictive practices by parent organization, it can NOT have the flexibility to stretch (itself) in pursuit of achieving the intended results.
Further, a project can also be viewed as a temporary organization that is created for the purpose of delivering business products (Managing Successful Projects With Prince2 2017 6th Edition, Axelos-Chapter 2). This temporary organization (or the project) is carved out of its parent organization with an intent to deliver those business-critical products, which may NOT otherwise be delivered by existing departments following standard practices of the organization. Therefore, applying parent-organization centric approach to the project will hamper the prospects of achieving intended delivery of business-critical products.
Thus, organizations intending to accomplish complex and dynamic tasks of critical importance with projects should frame their respective project management practice in such a way that projects get required flexibility and required autonomy during execution. This will allow projects operating under dynamic and unpredictable environment to themselves take ownership of the expected outcome and make persistent efforts to achieve the outcome throughout their life-cycle. For any organization, such a project management practice will eventually contributing to more impactful project management and increased success rate of projects.
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