Holistic project management - A new approach for managed services

Project Management has come of age in a sense that there exists a class of professional ldquoproject managersrdquo who drive research and development projects, ramp up production processes, and deliver turnkey infrastructure projects. These traditional roles have been sufficiently investigated by academia and practitioners, and methodological frameworks are available. However, the arena of ldquomanaged servicesrdquo, dealing with long-term, ongoing operations rather than one-time deployment and commisioning, has been neglected until now. The telecommunications industry is one of those currently undergoing a rigorous paradigm shift and value migration from equipment sales towards operations related services. The unidirectional view of project management as implementation management turns out to be insufficient in the light of the complexity and nature of this new contracting and vendor-operator partnership style. In this paper, we propose a new, ldquoholisticrdquo approach towards services project management, where inter-project learning and feedback cycles are integrated into our concept of the ldquoimplementation-oriented sales processrdquo that provides a better basis for closing long-term, stable and profitable operations services transactions. The enriched scope and diversified responsibilities of project management require a modified skill profile of the individual project management professional - a ldquonew generationrdquo engineering manager.