Good practices, the buzz word for project managers

Shrinking operational cycles in industries has made ‘practising the good practices' the buzz word for professional project managers who have sought to minimise the gestation in project management, according to Mr G Lakshmi Sekhar, Vice-President – Project Consultancy, of Infycareer Private Ltd, Chennai.

Delivering a special lecture on ‘Project management for professional career – need of the hour' under the Business Line Club lecture series held recently at Sri Krishna Institute of Management here, Mr Sekhar highlighted that global environment is increasingly ‘projectised', thanks to the demand pressures of industry from factors such as shorter product life, distributed environment, widening generation gap and gaining concept of private-public partnership. This pace has created a situation where operational cycle itself is seen as project

In this background, delivery of a project that meets the requirement of customers and that too within the set time-frame and cost is a challenge for a project manager.

According to Mr Sekhar, globally a third of projects are only successful and 80 per cent of the successful projects are attributed to the professionally trained managers handling them. While a third of the projects fail on account of cost and time over-lag, the rest get terminated midcourse for various other reasons. On the demand for trained project managers, he noted that one fifth of the global GDP spend is accounted for projects and in absolute terms these are worth about $12 trillion. To take care of this size, six million professional managers are needed. After the mobile and banking industries' success, India's educational sector is expected to trigger another wave of upgrade over the next ten years which would bring demand pressure for trained professionals, he felt.

The special lecture was attended among others by Dr C. Ramakrishnan, Director, SKIM, and Mr Suresh Menon, Assistant Regional Manager, The Hindu, Coimbatore.

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