Three Approaches to Management

by Paul Arveson

Government agencies cannot live by project management alone. Congress, in the GPRA, the Executive Branch in the Reinventing Government initiative, and DoD Secretary Cohen in the Defense Reform Initiative, are asking us to find ways to increase productivity and efficiency, while maintaining mission effectiveness. That is where the new management approaches come in -- they are more applicable than project management to the kinds of internal improvements that are needed.

The table below summarizes comparisons of three different management approaches or methodologies. The comparisons are shown for several different features. It is evident from this comparison that BPI and the Balanced Scorecard are quite different in most respects from project management. They have different purposes and meet different needs.

	Project Management	Business Process Improvement	Balanced Scorecard
Age of Approach	Decades	Began in DoD 1992	Began in 1990
Prime Customer	External Sponsor	Internal Director	External IG, Internal Director
Goal Definition	Project Requirements, Mission Needs Statement	Cost, cycle time reductions	Strategic management system
Focus	Technical Mission	Business Processes	Multiple perspectives
Scope	Specialized unit	unit to enterprise	dept. to enterprise
Plans	Plan of Action & Milestones	Process Improvement Plan	Strategic Plan, Performance Plan
Schedule & teaming	Work Breakdown Schedule, Action Items	Team directed, focus groups	Cross-functional teams, 1-2 yr. implementation
Management Activities	Team building, Budgeting, Task Tracking, Reviews	Baseline process analysis, to-be process design, automation	Define metrics, collect data, analyze data, decide on changes
Tools (see links)	Microsoft Project, Primavera	TurboBPR, IDEF0	Data collection system, scorecards
Measures of success	Deliverables on time, on budget	Cost reductions minus cost of BPI effort	Learning what strategies work; improved results on many metrics

In attempting to implement the newer management methodologies in a traditional project management organization, there are two possible options:

1. train the managers in the new approaches and techniques;
2. translate the new approaches into familiar project form, and treat them as conventional projects.

Option 1 is always recommended. The problem with that is that we do not have the time or money to spend on a lot of training in new techniques.

Option 2 is something that hasn't been suggested before, to my knowledge. I don't know if it is feasible, or even if it makes sense. But if it could be done, it would save a lot of time in deploying the new initiatives.

Option 2 was actually suggested by the DoD's 1998 Performance Plan, in which one of the top level mission goals was 'Cost Reduction'. In other words, the DoD management recognizes that this is in itself worthy of being a strategic goal on the level of its other missions, not just an internal efficiency need.

©1998 Paul Arveson