The 21st Century Business Administration Approach – Project Management

30 January 2021

The Industry Revolution 4.0 has been interrupted the first 2 decades of the 21st Century. With the starting of the third decade, Covid-19 Pandemic changed the norm. Today, while various vaccines insight, the experts worldwide still unable to see beyond the Pandemic yet, they started to warn us about the next possible pandemic. Worldwide economic are badly impacted, not just SME but also large corporations, including Oil and Gas, Hospitality and Tourism, Motion Pictures, Infrastructure, Transportation, etc. While Healthcare and Pharmaceutical industry might benefit from this situation, they need immediate shift their focus from what they planned to do in 2020 and move to what really matters now, by developing the vaccine for Covid-19. Whether you like it or not, we are deeply impacted by this volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA) situation and environment.

Business Objective changed overnight, and now the Covid-19 became the epicentre for transforming the corporate into creating business values for both the company and stakeholders. Corporate responsibility is no longer about profit but to realising benefits toward focusing Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance (ESG) factors in measuring the sustainability and societal impact of a company, which aligns with the United Nations 17 Sustainability Development Goals. The business objective is no longer permanent and long term but constantly change, adaptive, short term, and fast.

Project Management skills played a significant role in delivering these meaningful values to corporate leaders in this 21st Century. Defined by the Project Management Institute (PMI®), Project a temporary endeavour undertaken to create a unique product, service, or result, while Project Management is the application of knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques to project activities to meet the project requirements. Project Management skills are not just applicable for project managers and all project management practitioners, including junior executive until the chief executive officer (CEO). Why project management important in the 21st Century business administration approach?

1. Focusing the Values behind the Objective.

The upcoming Standard of Project Management (2021) by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and the PMI®, will be focusing on values for business and stakeholders. The project management community recognised that its success or failure was due to its accurate alignment with the business values, vision, missions, and strategy, especially the company strategy changed overnight during the VUCA situation. Many project sponsors or project managers failed to align the project objectives caused the loss of business investment. This statistic helped project management practitioners to relook the project’s goal from project objectives to value creation.

2. Being Predictive, Agile, and Hybrid.

The world is very unpredictable. Sometimes it is good, but sometimes it isn’t good. Company leaders must be able to adaptive to the situation, being a situational leader to lead the company to the desired state. During the good days, the leader should be predictable by creating a pleasant working environment. While during the challenging times, the leader should be able to be agile and lead the team to adapt to the environment. But sometimes, the leader should be hybrid to address the VUCA situation. But there are no such rules to when to apply any of the approaches. It is important what really matters most during the situation and condition.

3. Integrated as One.

During the Covid-19 Pandemic, the company’s department can no longer operate silo without collaborating with another department. The company leaders must immediately integrate all departments (HR, Finance, IT, Operation, etc.) and manage to deliver the company values to ensure its sustainability as one unit. Getting all the department heads to align into the single business strategy and ensuring the business continuously realises sustainable benefits and creates meaningful values to the company and its stakeholder.

4. Sprint It.

Long term or middle-term goal is no longer relevant in this destructive environment. Business stakeholders either are shareholders, clients, or internal staff, are no longer expective long term return as no one knows what happens tomorrow. They want immediate values no matters how small the value is. With the VUCA environment, the chance of the future goal will change as it goes. The company leaders should sprint the deliverable into many small packages and adapt to the changes while aligning with the company values and strategy.

So, how the coaches help the company leaders? Simon Sinek said, start with why in this infinite business environment. What is really matters to the company and the company’s leaders?  What are the company and the company’s leaders desired most? Project Management works well with the company values and the desired values using a predictive, agile or hybrid approach, especially in a VUCA environment. Organisational Project Management (OPM) will scale the delivery into enterprise collaboration among the departments, business units, and subsidiary companies through enterprise values, vision, and strategy.

What do you think?

By David Khaw, MBA, MPM, PMP, CPT, NS-NLP, CTC

Organisational Project Management Coach

Dated: 30/01/2021