How can economic conditions influence the acceptance of a project management methodology?The book says that during the recession senior managers realized that they did not know as much about project management as they needed to know. By the end of the recession companies started to recognize the need for a more structured and organized way to do projects and plan strategic planning. Companies understood the need for good strategic planning but they did not have a good way to implement their plans. Companies started understanding that they could use project management to implement their strategic plans as well as their operational plans. The book stated that another factor that helped in promoting project management acceptance in companies was strategic business units. The strategic business units were usually more excepting to the use of project manage and more aware of the necessity to obtain horizontal and vertical work flow. These groups recognized that project management was a vehicle for implementation of most any plan and any project.

According to Importance of project management in strategic planning article, Good Project Management is critical to keeping strategic targets on schedule. A strategic plan is usually management-driven and forward-looking. That means your strategic plan may take over three, five or ten years to achieve its goal. During that time, you need a heartbeat, or tracking method - to ensure everything is on the right course; or corrections are made at the right time to keep it on course. Any activity performed during the course of a project to ensure it remains on target is called Tactical Planning. Tactical Planning Decisions are made for short-term goals. A good project manager will monitor the overall life-cycle of a project, and suggest changes or adjustments as needed, depending on their requirements (Cost, Quality and Time drive most schedules...)Mattie 2012 stated that, research conducted with senior project management leaders on PMI's Global Executive Council found that the most important skill for managing today's complex projects and programs is the ability to align the team to the vision of the project and design the project's organizational structure to align people and project objectives.Importance of project management in strategic planning, 2014, http://wiki.answers.com Mattie, Geoff, August 2012, The Strategic Role of Project Management, article, http://projectmanagementinstitute In my own personal experience I have found this to be true. Where I use to work along right after the 9/11 instance our company decided that they need to do something. The company was growing at an astounding rate in fact we had quadrupled in size in the matter of 5 years and they had all these project going on around the world and they were having a tough time realizing the benefits and controlling them. All of the different business had their own way of doing things it was impossible to control or even know what was going on from one business to the other. Along about that time we started getting pressure from outside sources and completion on our product that they knew they had to change the way they done things. That is when they started training on the subject of Lean Six Sigma and pushing for a centralized project management system in all there plants. I was lucky because I was one of the first selected to be trained. This worked out really well for me and got to be part of the training group. The company went to Lean Six Sigma format for all its projects over the next 5 years and it is that way corporation wide

When the economy is favorable, management culture and changes in management style are considered slow to adapt. According to Kerzner (pg.153) it is the deterioration of economic conditions, which brings about a more rapid change in business organizations, with management believing that their guidance would serve to maintain their companies. This was evident with the 1989-1993 recession where management had previously accepted the implementation of project management at a tedious pace and senior management began to realize that this was no longer the case. Companies began to recognize that principles of project management could be used to implement strategic planning as well as operational planning.As Rezak (n.d.) points out, when an organization is impacted by an economic downturn, the actual degree of impact is dependent upon the industry, geography, company, and competitive environment. What is common across all these variables is that when financing becomes more difficult to obtain, many companies tend to react quickly and placed projects on hold. Some projects are postponed indefinitely while others are cancelled outright in midstream. Some projects already underway are merged with initiatives, scaled back, or scaled up with accelerated deadlines, while, new projects launched during the economic downturn were limited to those that were essential, focusing more on support projects as opposed to innovation projects.From my own experiences, a downturn in the economy places a lot of added stress on the organization; which in turn is passed along to the project team. With the typical knee-jerk reaction being to cut funding to a project in order to save money somewhere in the organization. The most common justification, or excuse I hear is always do more with less which is quickly followed up by do it faster. In the effort to save money, team members are often times expected to take on additional duties or taskings, or in some cases take on the complete role of a secondary person in addition to their own. Secondly, milestones and deadlines are moved forward, at the expense of the team to free up resources for use in the future. These cost cutting measures end up costing the organization more in the long run, whether it be in correcting mistakes that were made resulting in things having be reworked or the anticipated result falls short under the shortened deadline.Rezak, C. (n.d.). Project Team Success in Todays Economy: Back to Business and Back to Basics. Business Simulation Games for Corporate Companies. Retrieved March 10, 2014, from http://www.paradigmlearning.com/documents/ProjectTeamSuccessinToday'sEconomy003.pdfThis question seems pretty straight-forward, and its approached in a straight-forward fashion in our Kerzner text: During favorable economic times, changes in management style and corporate culture move very slowly, but favorable economic conditions dont last forever As economic conditions deteriorate, change occurs more and more quickly in business organizations By the end of the recession in 1993, companies finally recognized the importance of both strategic planning and project management, as well as the relationship between them, (p.153-154).Unfortunately, the response the response of some companies during poor economic times isnt always to implement Project Management but to eliminate it. According to Kevin Barry of PM Alliance, During good economic times, investing in project management is financially feasible and acceptable by most companies. However, during bad economic times, project management is considered an overhead cost and the tendency is to downsize, (Barry 2009). Its understandable that during bad economic times, a company might want to cut back on all of the unnecessary expenses. However, viewing Project Management as an unnecessary expense may be a mistake that they dont live to regret. If you suddenly found yourself in poor economic times does it make sense to divorce your wife because feeding an extra person costs extra money? If you just look at the numbers, its possible that you could come to that conclusion. But looking at it logically yes, it costs more to feed two people than just one, but your wife is also a helpmate she can clip coupons with you, look for an additional job, and take care of other aspects of life, like cooking doughnuts when you are otherwise occupied with money-producing activities. Divorcing your wife would simply halve your family units productive capacity and similarly, cutting out your Project Management program will halve your businesss productive capacity.References:Kerzner, H. (2004). Advanced Project Management: Best Practices on Implementation. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.Barry, K. (2009). The Importance of Project Management in a Down Economy. PM Alliance Project Management. Retrieved March 3, 2014, from http://pm-alliance.com/The_Importance_of_Project_Management_in_a_Down_Economy.pdf.