Project Management Fundamentals and LNB Project management

Practice

1. Creating a project management information system, this is absolutely

essential to support the previous four components.

Today’s global market companies, regardless of industry and size, are looking to

improvement their systems and become more competitive one way they are

attempting to do this is by establishing project management as a core competency

throughout the organization. By setting up standardized procedure with in the

companies, they hope to learn from past mistakes, make processes more efficient,

and develop people is skills and talents to work more effectively. The list of

organization attempting to integrate project management disciplines and best

practices into the way they manage their businesses is expanding daily; however

those who have succeeded in doing so is significantly smaller(Bolles, 2002).

Nowadays, the natures of business functions are becoming more complex. To keep

track of the effectiveness of the business, to gain advantage over competitors, to

produce goods and services to the market, to handle personnel records properly a

systematic way of collecting and processing data has become the daily practice of

businesses.

The LNB policies, procedures and relationship confine all information to freeze

following the hierarchy, which is defined for a functional organization. However, the

success of project management should require intact information and that allows

information flows should be across the hierarchical components.

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 Therefore, developing a project management information system would be part of a

component for creating successful environment in LNB, since implementing project

management information system is the most important for the successful

implementation of others executive project fundamentals

2. Establish project based organization.

Structure of a project depends on the organization goals, type of work in the project and

the environment. “The basic purpose for initiating a project is to accomplish specific

goals. The reason for organizing the task as a project is to focus the responsibility and

authority for the attainment of the goals on an individual or small group”. (Meredith and

Mantel, 2006)

Choosing an organizational structure among the three types of organization structure of

a project is determined by the situation, risk involved and cultural preferences of the

parent organization. Types of project structures are: -

• Pure project structure

• Functional Project structure

• Matrix project structure

Bolles(2002) mentioned that positioning the project management function in a

hierarchical organizational structure establishes its autonomy and thus ”ownership” of

the responsibility for setting up ,distributing, supporting ,and managing the application of

project management practices within the company. Since position in the project

management function at the highest level within the organization provides the measure

of autonomy necessary to extend its authority across the organization while

substantiating the value and importance the function has in the eyes of executive

management.

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Graham and Englund(2004) also stated that the fully projectized organization is best

when projects are the lifeblood of the firm. It helps ensure that projects are as high in

quality as possible and done in the minimum time .These is because most resources

are fully dedicated to projects only, not departmental work. In reality, because project

work is different, it requires a project based organization.

LNB currently implemented traditional management structure, which is forced the

functional managers to emphasize for own departmental success and each department

sets its own priority of works and strives to achieve them, non-integrated efforts. This

reveals the existence of less emphasis to link between LNB’s strategy and projects.

The LNB Personnel directors also proposed the new organizational structure to be

matrix project structure, in which the bank integrate projects into functional departments,

that means functional control departments while project managers coordinate the work

across functions But as it is clearly described on Graham and Englund( 2004), the

matrix organization tended to cause more problems than it solved .the major fault was

that it was a marginal change-a mere modification to the old hierarchical organization

Thus as executive project management fundamentals dictates, LNB’s management

requires to set up suitable organizational structure that supports for project

management success. The suitable and effective organization structure for the

implementation of project management is pure project based organizational structure