Working by Projects Rather than by Routines

If innovation is today's imperative for competitiveness, then the modern firm must invest to promote it. In order to foster innovation, the company must first look at products, processes, systems, relations amenable to improvement and orient the actors needed to implement it (employees, suppliers, allies, customers) Among the necessary conditions for innovation, there is the ability to think in terms of projects and the capacity to realize them. To innovate means giving life to a project. And a project is developed by people who have in mind and aim at an operational objective in a systematic way. This objective is collectively defined and pursued. It's astonishing that in the average firm project thinking is mostly absent. People mostly have in mind process paradigms, thought for routine efficiency and control, rather than effectiveness, which often leads to often formally correct, rather than substantially useful behavior. One is often surprised by the degree of fragmentation of tasks in companies that are ruled by norms and compliance. They are often used to shirk responsibility and even blocking the actors of innovation inside and outside the firm. Efficiency on the job is a duty for all firms, but adopting exaggerated forms of operational regulation is an illusory recipe for control, rather than dealing with the necessity of doing new things in new ways. Complementary to the standardization of behaviors within the firm, there must be a readiness to dare changing processes and products, by proposing alternatives that can be objectively demonstrated. For this, a company needs people able to think in terms of projects. If such people exist, the pockets of efficiency within the firm become domains of innovation. By diffusing know-how and abilities about project work beyond the usual niches where it is often confined (R&D units, information systems, engineering etc.), the company augments the likelihood that normal employees can see the opportunities for innovation in established process flows, and, more importantly, feel motivated to share in and execute the implementation of innovation.

Many companies are investing in activities to enhance the knowledge of project management among their collaborators; other companies are looking to improve on process-based work by inserting project work teams. Project management can also start with proper choices in terms of governance. Project-based governance starts with top management and ends with accumulation of human capital, the first condition to attain effective innovation.