Building Project Management Centers of Excellence

The Importance of Positioning

Consider what would happen if a company did not have the typical business functional departments—engineering, finance, purchasing, etc.—established at the corporate level. Without these enterprise-wide business functions, the managers within each business unit would have to decide how engineering, finance, purchasing, etc., would be done in their areas of responsibility without considering the need to manage shared resources and communicate important information with other departments. Because the business functions critical to managing the company as a whole would differ from department to department, there would be few, if any, common processes. Work would be completed in an ad hoc environment, and chaos would ...