At one time, quality mattered in an IT project. Quality and cost effectiveness were the marks of success, and the person who could deliver those results was a successful project manager. Not any more, says Bob Lewis. Today, flexibility and speed reign supreme.

"Thanks to the maneuver warfare that modern business has become, [project management is] now the single most important discipline in the enterprise. And it's been stood on its head," Lewis warns in a post at InfoWorld.

To compete in today's business environment, companies are pressed to deliver changes (i.e. projects) fast. Success in maneuver warfare, "including the version we call business competition," rests on how fast an organizations can cycle through the Observe, Orient, Decide and Act (OODA) loop, Lewis writes. The fastest companies win because they set the pace of change. When the "act" component entails launching a project, things have a tendency to slow down dramatically though. "Even in the most evidence-driven, analytics-intensive organization, projects that come out of the decision-making effort take much longer than the other three steps combined," he writes.

To stay ahead of the competition, a business's projects have to move faster, meaning that project cycle time becomes the top priority, edging out cost and quality. But that's not all. Not only do individual projects have to be completed faster, but IT across the board has to expand its project capacity, meaning that throughput also gains importance above cost and quality. Finally, "[g]iven that the whole point of undertaking projects is to increase the business's flexibility and adaptability, excellence joins cycle time and throughput as the third parameter project management should be optimizing," Lewis writes. Cost and quality are now afterthoughts.

The criteria that define "good" projects have been stood on their head, say Lewis in the post. What's more, most project managers haven't grasped this radical change in priorities.

For more:
- see Bob Lewis' post at InfoWorld

Related Articles:
IT projects 20 times more likely to fail than other business initiatives
How failure is built into many large projects
How FedEx reduced software project risks