Since 2007, Roncucci&Partners has been involved in project management, or the techniques and methodologies of project management in business. It deals with it through years of training, but also through practical application within corporate organizations.
Project management, in fact, cannot be operational in a company if it is not ready to work on projects. Considering the difficult years we are living through, we are convinced that the introduction and development of project management in a business organization can contribute effectively to improved management. The issue is knowing what we are talking about, believing in it and experimenting.
Roncucci&Partners, for example, contributed to the introduction of project management, alongside management by functions, in Nova Coop, a consumer cooperative in Piedmont, with about 1 billion euros in turnover and 5,000 employees. It was 2017, so before the revolutions we are currently experiencing, when the strong commitment of the management team, together with the structuring of an efficient dedicated organizational unit (PMO – Project Management Office) led to an experience that the company considers very positive.
Is the PMO always sufficient these days?
Today, precisely because it is facing with new challenges, and new difficulties, Nova Coop has found it useful and necessary to place risk management alongside project management, that is, to introduce the culture of risk within project management. This is a new bet, but in unaccustomed times unaccustomed answers are necessary. Roncucci&Partners has therefore begun the process of introducing risk management within Nova Coop, with theoretical, practical and training side-by-side sessions.
Certainly project and risk management are not the panacea for all ills, but the companies in which Roncucci&Partners has introduced these techniques are coping better with the new contexts. The greatest difficulty lies in the willingness of the management team, because if the management team is not convinced and thinks that project management makes them lose the “power” to make decisions, which has happened to us, then it is better to give up and hope that everything will go well anyway.
The issue is a complex one, and it also concerns human resources, which places horizontal, or management, skills alongside the vertical skills represented by professional skills. In a national university structure that teaches not management but the expression of vertical skills, the issue is complex and not easy to understand. But it is the only way we believe is necessary to deal with the chaos we will have to get used to; that is, to acquire a new corporate culture, where the reallocation of responsibility, and the assumption of delegation, means changing that hierarchical-functional culture to which we are accustomed.
Roncucci&Partners is proud to have been working on these issues for years, issues that are very relevant today and in which several companies are showing a growing interest.
