중소기업 생산성 향상을 위한 체계적인 프로젝트 관리방식의 도입 : 중소기업과 대기업의 프로젝트관리 성숙도 비교

초록

As the competition becomes more intense in the business environment, business firms are paying more attention on how to achieve and maintain competitive advantages. Recently, the concept of business excellence is receiving attention from the business firms that are trying to achieve sustainable competitive advantage. Since the concept of business excellence was first introduced in the 1980s, quality management method was usually used to achieve business excellence. This paper suggests that project management can be a good vehicle to achieve business excellence by comparing the basic principles of business excellence with those of quality management and project management. The comparison shows that project management can support the concept of business excellence in terms of process management, that is, a systematic way of developing plans, organizing workforce, and executing the tasks. The process management capability is an important enabler of business excellence concept as can be seen in the EFQM Excellence Model. Business firms can achieve business excellence more effectively and efficiently by employing the project management skills and knowledge. In this regard, it is necessary for business firms to possess a proper level of project management capability. Project management maturity is a level indicating a business firm's capability to manage project systematically. Project Management Maturity Model (PMMM) is a model that can help a business firm assess and improve its project management capability in comparison to the best practices known in the industry. It is important and essential for business firms to improve their project management maturity because it is the project management capability that handles the special tasks, such as R&D activities to develop new products and new technologies, which have significant impacts on the survival and long term prosperity of a business firm in the increasingly competitive business environment. These are particularly important issues for small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) since they are usually at disadvantage compared to the large firms in terms of resource and management capability. Literature review shows that there is not enough research done on investigating project management maturity issues for Korean business firms although it has important implications for Korean SMEs to improve their competitiveness against large firms. In this research, we (1) developed a tool to measure the project management maturity of a business firm in the form of survey questionnaire; (2) conducted the survey and collected data from business managers who had participated in the projects that were carried out in both SMEs and large firms; (3) analyzed the data by comparing SMEs and large firms, and by industry types and the project sizes; (4) made a few useful suggestions from the results. An empirical study was conducted by survey method and statistical analysis of the collected data. Data was collected from 204 managers in various industries such as construction, engineering, IT and telecommunication, manufacturing and production, R&D, etc. The questionnaire measured the responses from the managers regarding the perceived project management maturity levels of the projects in which they were involved. The questionnaire contained questions regarding the ten areas of project management knowledge: they were integration, scope, time, cost, quality, human resource, communication, risk, procurement, and professional ethics. The total number of questions was 49 excluding the respondent's personal information. The data was analyzed for comparison of the project management maturity levels of the groups by firm size, industry types, and project size. The results were summarized in tables to show the differences between and among the groups. First, the project management maturity levels of SMEs and large firms were compared in terms of average scores in Table 5. For all ten knowledge areas, SMEs showed lower scores than large firms, and most of the average score differences between the two groups were statistically significant. This result indicates that SMEs seem to be less capable in project management capability compared to large firms, which again implies that the project performance by SMEs may be less satisfactory than those by large firms in terms of cost and schedule efficiency. The lower performance may also be related to the lower productivity for the projects conducted by the SMEs. Second, the maturity levels were compared among different industries. The data was divided into four industry groups of construction and engineering, IT and telecommunication, manufacturing and production, and R&D industry. In each industry group, the data was again divided into the two groups of SMEs and large firms. Table 6 shows the results of the analysis. Except for very few cases, large firms showed higher scores of maturity levels compared to SMEs regardless of the industry type. One notable thing is that the differences between SMEs and large firms were the smallest for manufacturing and production industry. These results again confirm the superiority of large firms against SMEs in project management capability regardless of the industry type and the knowledge area. Third, the differences in project management maturity levels were investigated by the project size measured in terms of budget assigned to the project. This analysis was motivated from the conjecture that large scale projects tend to use more human and capital resources compared to smaller scale projects, and therefore the project management process tends to be more systematic and structured, thus leading to higher scores of maturity levels. The projects were grouped into five categories based on the budget amount of the projects, and the number of projects assessed for each of the five maturity levels was counted. The results were presented in Table 7. The results showed that the large scale projects, e.g. with a larger budget, tend to have higher scores of maturity level than smaller scale projects, e.g., with a smaller budget. One possible explanation may be that the large scale projects use more resources in terms of manpower, capital, and equipment, and the business firms have greater necessity and motivation to manage the resources systematically and efficiently. Also, large scale projects may have better capability to establish structured project management processes and systems as well as to invest more time and effort in training the people. Therefore, large scale projects showed higher scores for project management maturity. The results showed that there were clear and significant differences of project management maturity levels between SMEs and large firms, and among the industry types and the project sizes. The firms with different project management maturity levels may have different levels of project management capability, which will again lead to different levels of performance in terms of cost and time efficiency, and productivity. These days, all business firms desire to achieve business excellence. Project management capability is a very effective way to achieve excellence and sustainable competitiveness. Business firms need to pay attention and invest their time and effort to gain knowledge and to accumulate experience, which are essential elements for developing and establishing a mature project management processes and systems. PMMM will provide useful guidelines and an effective tool for assessing and improving the project management capability for business firms.

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