Top Management Support

Top Management Support (TMS) is the most important critical success factor for project success. Top Management involvement in projects can positively and negatively impact project portfolio success at the same time. Thus, it is important for practitioners to design organizational governance structures and job descriptions to increase the portfolio management performance while implementing or reconfiguring the formal role definition of involved managers. Some recommended key themes that are commonly cited in many studies, and these themes are as follows:

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·??????? Devoting time to the program in proportion to its potential & cost

·??????? Reviewing plans

·??????? Following up on results

·??????? Facilitating the management problems involved with integrating systems with the management process of the business.

The focus of the organizations should also be in the form of top management support, motivation misalignment, and monitoring and control strategy. For example: following the understanding of the top management support presented above, management support could be in the form of aligning the human and financial resource elements, such as an experienced team capable of meeting the project needs. It also plays a prime role in the success of a project team by giving the required political backing and aligning the resource management systems (human, financial, and technological) with the needs of projects. Top management support is a ‘meta-factor’ that incorporates other Critical Success Factors.? Studies show that the most important condition for project success such as competent, focussed and hardworking project staff may receive lower value. Project staff may play a very important role in project success or failure but if the minimum level of competency is recruited, then project success can be almost completely regulated by the quality of top management support. Additionally, high-level planning seems to play important role in project success if it reveals the motivations and beliefs of a project decision-making sponsor. User involvement seems to be valuable in calling requirements, but their actual worth seems to be present when top managers use the procedure of meeting user requirements to accomplish expectations. Transparency of top management plays an important role in undertaking issues and conflicts between diverse user priorities. Furthermore, project to be effective, the project team should be supported to take action proactively and promptly with regards to problem solving.

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Additionally, from the definition of top management support (TMS) presented above, we can see that TMS is “when a senior management, the CEO and other senior managers devote time to plans review, results follow up, and facilitate management problems”. The cost and potential of the project will determine what time should be spent. We can understand this as the fact that CEO and the other senior managers should allocate time only to be aware of the project status and interfere if necessary and a project top management should also employ much time on these activities. Understanding how important the TMS factor is, gives the explanation of why we have some projects successes or failures. Top management support also relates to effective decision-making to manage risk and to authorize business process change. It appears that TMS is most dependent on the ability of the project client to work with other top managers to authorize business process changes and make decisions to mitigate or bear risk. Success also appears to be dependent on the willingness of the CEO to actively intervene when the client lacks the authority or influence to resolve any impasses in decision-making.

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In conclusion, Today, project management is one of the growing disciplines in many organizations. However, ironically, the statistics of project success indicates that many projects do not accomplish their business results and most projects still fail. This gives possibly a unique opportunity for substantial improvement in the field. In this newsletter, perspectives were offered on the challenge that the project management community is facing today. This may help stimulating the debate and discussion about the future of the discipline. ?However, even though these views are not unique, they may provide an integrated perspective of the discipline.? They may also provide a possible trigger for more discussion that may help attract scholars from other more established academic disciplines and improve the status of project management disciplines.