Senior executives and project management officers around the world appear to have very different perceptions of how seriously their organisations take project management.
That's one of the startling findings contained in the 11th annual global "Pulse of the Profession" survey published recently by the US-based Project Management Institute (PMI).
The survey involved 3 234 project management professionals, 200 senior executives, and 510 PMO directors from a range of industries spanning most world regions including the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) alongside North America, Asia Pacific, Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean.
It was clear from the interviews that many senior executives were making the connection that projects and programmes were the core of their strategic initiatives. In addition, more executive leaders classified more of their organisation's projects as "strategic initiatives" - 50% in the 2017 survey compared to 38% in 2016. Yet, one in four (28%) of those strategic initiatives failed outright and only 60% of the rest met some goals.
A majority of senior leaders acknowledged that their organisations often struggled to bridge the gap between strategy formulation and its day-to-day implementation.
The survey clearly indicated that one of the primary causes of failure was a lack of clearly defined objectives and milestones to measure progress, which suggests a lack of discipline when implementing strategic issues.
However, the problem could go deeper than that - to a clear disconnect between executives' perception of project management within their organisations, and the perception of the PMO directors on the ground.
When asked whether their organisation fully understood the value of project management, 83% of the executives said "yes", but this figure dropped to 54% when the PMO directors were asked the same question.
A similar disconnect appeared when the executives and the PMO directors were asked about how high a priority their organisation placed on different aspects of project management.
Three quarters (75%) of executives said their organisation placed a high or very high priority on investing in technology to better enable project success, with only 4% stating that this was a somewhat low or low priority.
However, PMO directors (PMOs) had a very different view. Nearly one quarter (25%) said technology investment was a low or somewhat low priority with only 14% (executives - 35%) and 28% (executives 40%) putting this as a very high or somewhat high priority.
Similarly, when it came to developing technical skills for project management, 32% of senior executives said this was a "very high" priority within their organisations, compared to 18% of PMOs.
While 7% of senior executives acknowledged that the development of strategic implementation skills among executives as a low priority within their organisations, and 30% stated it was a very high priority, 27% of PMOs said that this aspect of project management was a low priority compared to 11% who said it ranked as a very high priority.
And so it continued through questions around the development of leadership skills for management of projects (very high priority - 28% executive leaders; 20% PMOs); creating a culture for organisational change (very high priority - 28% executive leaders; 15% PMOs); developing business skills for the management of projects (27% executive leaders; 15% PMOs); and - tellingly - developing skills for executive sponsorship of projects, 27% of executives said this was a very high priority compared with just 7% of PMOs.
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