Ýêîíîìè÷åñêèå íàóêè/6Ìàðêåòèíã è ìåíåäæìåíò
Ametova Zh.A.
Republic of Kazakhstan,
Al-Farabi Kazakh National University
Assessment
criteria of the company's project activity
Nowadays
many companies transfer their firm business operations on a project basis.
Project management implementation is connected with the need to trace the
results of the done work more legibly, to pinpoint the emersed deviations by
the due date and to bring in the corrective measures. According to estimates of
the American Institute for Business Value IBM studying the business processes
effectiveness, the project management system gives up to 20% of business value increment
at the expense of more effective use of the resources.
Project management system is the management area covering those companies’
activities in which the creation of a product, services or any business event
execution is realized as a unique complex of the interdependent goal-oriented
processes at the particular requirements to terms, budget and characteristics
of the expected result. Originally the existence of these restrictions for the
project managers was only the instrument of definition of the project framework
and balance assessment of these competing resources, way of monitoring and
project control. Over the course of time triple project restriction started to
be called a triplet of the project success, i.e. a method of the project
effectiveness definition and measurement. Graphically these restrictions such
as time, cost, contents which compete among themselves can be presented in the
form of an isosceles triangle sides which are in the direct dependence. I.e. if
there is a change of one side of the triangle, for example, the increase in the
amount of works, it will surely cause the increase in other sides, i.e. cost
and project terms. This simple implement gives the chance to the managing
director and his command to organize the work most efficiently throughout all
the project life cycle.
However
it should be noted that the triple restriction is necessary, but is not enough
since there are many cases in practice when the projects which have been
executed in time, within the budget and according to specification requirements
were not apprehended as successful by the main concerned parties. In this
regard project managers need to expand the criteria list of the project
effectiveness assessment taking into account the stakeholders' satisfaction
level and business results' achievement. Inclusion of the indexes
characterizing the project qualitative purposes, instead of the quantitative
has to be the main addition.
In the companies, which besides economic efficiency, take on itself the
load in the form of social and state obligations (natural monopolies, national
companies), indexes of social effectiveness and others, more specific indexes,
for example the accounting of political (Force-In/Force-Out
Projects) a component, i.e. when the company is compelled to realize the
project initiated by the top management regardless of their actual
effectiveness, can participate. Thus, the effectiveness assessment is based on
definition, criterion selection which can vary depending on the organization
scope of activity, the projects characteristic and system structure.
At the present stage of development the project-oriented companies even
more often use the system of the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) — the concept of
transfer and decomposition of the strategic objectives for scheduling of the
operating activities and their achievement monitoring. In fact BSC is a
mechanism of interrelation of strategic plans and decisions with the daily
tasks, the way to direct the whole company's (or group) activity on their
achievement. At the business processes level the monitoring of strategic
activity is exercised through the so-called Key Performance Indicator (KPI).
KPI are the indicators of the achievement of an objective, and also the
characteristics of business processes and work of each certain employee
effectiveness.
The advantage of BSC is in that the organization which has introduced
this system, receives as a result "the frame of references" of the
actions according to the strategy at any levels of management and connects
various functional areas, as, for example, human resource management, finance,
informational technologies, etc.
However we suggest creating on
the basis of the methodology of Balanced Scorecard (BSC) the model of the
project success assessment considering opinion of all the concerned parties
(the model of complex estimates by the strategic criteria). The assessment has a
complex character and is built with the use of BSC methodology on the basis of
taking note of the project on the improvement Key Performance Indicators of the
company, i.e. to count the complex assessment by the strategic criteria as the
weighted mean value of improvement rate of Key Performance Indicator, on the
basis of comparison of their actual values with the target or alarm values.
Thus the target and alarm values, as well as weights of the indexes used in an
assessment, have to be defined within the processes of strategic management by
the company.
The results of this assessment type allow detecting of "narrow"
places in the company activity, to define the efficiency factor and, the main
thing, to reveal potential opportunities for increasing the effectiveness of
the company's activity.
References
E. Westerveld*, Berenschot
Osborne, Europalaan 40, 3526 KS Utrecht, The Netherlands