Enhancing Project Maturity at Ericsson (Mini-Case Study: 2.3)

Q1. Identify the project management maturity level against the 5-level maturity model introduced above. Give reasons for your categorization.

To deliver projects successfully, the commitment of time and resources is highly required.  Project management maturity models are designed to provide the framework that an organization needs for developing its capabilities for delivering successful projects. Therefore, to make a project management successful, a proper support structure must be there. However, levels of support will vary based on the level of PM maturity and other factors like project complexity.

The three stages in meeting the project management maturity are:

§  Developing an efficient way of project management.

§  Reaching the stage in which projects perform well as an entirety.

§  It is a continuous selection of projects which contributes to a sustainable competitive edge of the organization.

I might say that the reason of categorizing Ericsson at level 5, is that Ericsson evaluates all the information obtained through benchmarking and decides whether the information will improve the remarkable methodology or not. Ericsson is also more committed to benchmarking and to continuous improvement, and its project managers build competency models in broad areas of scientific, technical skills, leadership skills and process skills.

Q2. Discuss the special challenges a multinational corporation like Ericsson faces in developing greater project management maturity.

I think that one of the main complexities that might face multinational cooperation like Ericsson is when employing workers from different national categories and backgrounds. Thus, multinational organizations must differentiate the traditional HRM from an international point of view, because the international processes include more concerns such as managing expatriate employees and implementing different management practices.

In this case, my recommendation is to manage the differences between countries by adapting organizational policies that deals and copes with different national contexts, as some policies might be effective here but not otherwhere. Also, the flexibility of people management policies is essential  to deal and observe demographic and cultural change.

Finally, It doesn't mean that if we want to globalize a business we can globalize a culture as well. But to be successful we must always take into account cultural differences.