Published in PM World Today - February 2008 (Vol. X, Issue II)

PM WORLD TODAY – FEATURED PAPER – FEBRUARY 2008

Project Management in China
By Professor Hubert Vaughan
Institute of International Engineering Project Management, Tsinghua University

PMBOK was introduced to China at the beginning of this 21 st Century. Since its early introduction, professional and senior management realized the advantages and benefits of project management practice can help them minimize project delay, reduce project cost, improve product and service quality, and utilize their technical resources effectively. After seven years of learning and using PMBOK contents, the current status of project management practice in China is encouraging. More than fifteen thousand professionals are certified by PMI, and numerous organization hiring and training project managers to manage their projects. However, the end result is not encouraging. Project Managers still find their projects being delayed, cost over-run, quality had not improve, and still lack of resources to perform project tasks. Most organizations, specially IT and Telecom groups, are unable to determine the value of project management practices and the return of their investment on training project manager. Few in China realized the fact that project management is in fact a management culture, a culture that must embedded into the project delivering models in order to maximize the management knowledge in practice, and make project management worked. Project Delivery Models Most projects delivered in China do not have a well defined, structured delivery approach. A simple 3-stages delivery process was use in most projects, the initial Preparation Stage, the central Execution Stage, and the final Close-up Stage. The Execution Stage is a cycle of Analysis, Design, Construct, and Review, which make the Execution Stage a continuous Code and Fix cycle until project objectives are archived, or the original concept have to be