Question

How to oversee projects? Jas Google, Apple, General Electric, and Sony all have over 1,000 projects being implemented concurrently every day of the year across borders and differing cultures.

Questions: How do these organizations oversee the management of all these projects? How were these projects selected? How do they ensure performance measurement and accountability? How can project management continually improve?

Answer 1

Solution:

The management of the projects that are carried out over different boundaries and cultures is managed very effectively by the organizations. With the widespread use of internet and connectivity the virtual teams are able to work in unison with their project teams to constantly be in touch with each other to carry out the project work effectively. It becomes necessary for these project teams which can be very large to stay connected to share information regarding the project and make informaed decisions about the project. Hence, with the use of sophisticated software tools, project management tools and the use of virtual working, meetings helps in overseeing the projects with comparative ease.

The projects that are carried out in big organizations such as Google, Apple are very huge in number. There are thousands of projects that would be running simultaneously at these organizations and hence selection of appropriate projects and approving selected projects is a critical task for the project development teams. The projects are generally selected based on a few pre determined parameters such as financial impact, disruptive technology or development of much in demand product or service. Hence, project proposals are ranked based on these paramters and then informed decision is taken after evaluation of project proposals to select the ones that qualif the required criteria.

The performance and measurement of the project depends on the pre determined metrics for the project. Whenever a project idea is apprioved the project plan would include all the information and metrics based on which the project will be evaluated. The project scope helps in getting such information. Hence, the performance of the project can be measured using pre-developed metrics. In order to ensure continual development and improvement of projects we can implement sophisticated tools such as PDCA cycle to continually check for improvement in project processes and keep them improving continually.

Hence, these are some of the ways in which projects are managed at large organizations.