What is Business Synergies Approach?

The systemic business synergies entrepreneurial approach is concerned with discovering possibilities for adding value to the organization, not with finding solutions within given constraints. Though this approach is built on the old triple constraints of project management – cost, duration, and outcome, – it goes beyond these constraints to consider factors for developing business results.

Why Business Synergies Approach?

Change in the marketplace that is accelerating and occurs at increasingly random patterns today, increases the market risk and the necessity of having project managers make important decisions at the project level during its implementation. Constraints imposed earlier may become obsolete very fast, and there is no time to constantly check in with upper management before acting to keep up with changing conditions.

Two Approaches to Project Management

1. Business Administration – focuses on finding solutions within given constraints (output, time, and budget); characterized by an early design freeze that creates a stable target for the project; effective when duration of the project - or the time required to innovate - is shorter than the rate of change in the business environment.

2. Business Synergies – focuses on adding value to the organization and maximizing return on investment; does not lock down design earlier than absolutely necessary not to miss a newly emerging opportunity; effective for managing innovation projects in the rapidly changing environment, where change cycle is shorter than or equal to the duration of the project

New Mindset of the Upper Management

The parent organization should treat the project as and internal start-up or a spinout that, in a competitive environment, develops an outcome that supports the overall organizational strategy and, in particular, the corporate venture strategies,  and contributes to its competitive sustainable advantage.

Organizations should provide an enabling environment to empower the project manager to act as a CEO and thus to contribute his best to the corporate strategy.

Apart from providing the necessary funding, the organization should shield the project manager from organizational restrictions, reward results, and exercise minimal control.

Many of these organizations will need to change their mindset, redefine their concept of organization and loose controls in order to expand their capacity for speed. They should broaden their tolerance to mistakes and encourage entrepreneurial approaches not only verbally, but by creating conditions by which you can be an entrepreneur.

New Tasks of the Project Manager

Entrepreneurial management is fundamentally different  from corporate management that is focused on delivering the annual operating plan. ou need to consider your project and your project outcome lifecycle in a wider context of the overall organizational strategy. Unlike traditional project manager who has to meet static constraints of project deadlines, budget, and outcome, you should act as an entrepreneur and deal with a dynamic business system. You should be able to manage for broader economic and financial gain for the project and project outcome lifecycle, thereby contributing increased shareholder value to your company.

To achieve that goal, you would require to have a broader understanding of the whole business and the way your project supports the overall strategy and fits into the dynamics of the business system. You should also be prepared to fine-tune the project budget and the project as a whole in response to market changes and competitor actions in order to react timely to arising problems and emerging opportunities.

Managing Innovation Projects vs. Lifestyle Projects

Managing innovation requires specific business systems approaches. "If you try to manage the uncertainty inherent in innovation with tools and thinking designed for the relative certainty of operations, you'll run into trouble... You'll be continuously surprised as your assumptions prove false."⁵

Innovation Project Management: The Jazz of Innovation

The improvisation-driven model for innovation project management doesn’t discard structure, just as there is a clear structure to good jazz. In innovation, this structure is created through roadmaps, guiding principles, business processes, systems and organizational charts. Strategic-planning and road-mapping processes cannot guarantee brilliant flashes of creative insight, but they can prepare minds and increase the odds that such flashes occur in real time. Thus structure, as chords do in jazz, serves as a basis for improvisation, experimentations, discoveries and innovation... More

Radical Project Management

As radical innovation projects are characterized by higher levels of uncertainties – technical, market, and organizational, –  patterns of their journey to the marketplace are unlike those in incremental innovation projects... More

New System of Success Measurement and Control

Entrepreneurial approach to project management that understands the dynamics of the marketplace and competition may require radical change in the project success measurement and control systems of most organizations. Business-oriented controls should focus on market performance, timing and investing for higher return rather than on meeting fixed specifications and constraints. They must resist the temptation to use operating-plan logic to manage new ventures.

Murphy's Law in Project Management