In 2007, Dennis Bolles and Darrell Hubbard released a compelling book called The Power of Enterprise-wide Project Management. In it, they describe a growing sense of recognition in business management circles that project management is an emerging business function that enables enterprises to succeed at what they do. The primary focus of the book presents an argument for executives and senior managers to establish project management as a core competency enterprise-wide within their organization.
In the development of their argument, one of the questions that Bolles and Hubbard set out to answer is, “How can mature project business management practices and processes add value to the enterprise’s operations?” While the answer may vary some based on the industry, one example lies in how project management roles and methods can improve the chances of successful development of products or services by an organization. While Bolles and Hubbard fail to develop this particular argument in The Power of Enterprise-wide Project Management, this is one strong argument for the establishment for enterprise project roles and project business management throughout an organization.
A Need for Precision
Those who have read Joseph Heller’s 1960s classic Catch-22 might recall that one of the book’s central characters was a U.S. Army officer named &