Managing future success

Good project management is vital in order to protect investment and attract more foreign direct investment (FDI) into Ireland in the future. That's according to Niall Murphy, president of the Ireland Chapter of the Project Management Institute (PMI).

He also says the role of the project manager in Ireland will never be greater than it will be during Brexit.

PMI is the largest professional body of project managers in the world and the Ireland Chapter of PMI provides a forum for project managers to meet and learn from each other, while also maintaining their continuous professional development.

Ireland currently has the third largest number of project managers per head of population in the world, putting it in a prime position to successfully attract more FDI.

Murphy says when looking at FDI, much of it is made up of projects that need to be managed.

“If you were to build a data centre or a new pharma plant, those are one- or two-year projects that involve a huge amount of expenditure and set-up. You may have subsequent projects to commission everything and get people on board to get the operations up and running.

“Once operations are set up here, a lot of work is projectised; things are done as a sequence of projects. A lot of the companies coming in are multinationals – they have operations all around the world and they need to connect everything together and get all parts of the organisation working, and that’s what PMs do.

“I’m involved in information technology and there are people in Beijing, Bangalore and Prague that are all working on projects that we direct from Ireland. If you’re a multinational and you’ve got good project management, your operation in Ireland is going to be good but you can also stitch in and connect the organisation across the world. We do that well in Ireland,” he says.

Decision-makers

He says this puts project managers closer to decision-makers in multinationals, therefore they’re closer to deciding the work and selection of projects.

Incoming president of the Ireland Chapter Pat Lucey agrees that project management as a discipline has a key role in attracting FDI to our shores.

“When we talk about this county’s strategy being to climb the value chain and get higher-value jobs into the country, when you reach the top of that chain you’re talking about pure R&D jobs and PM jobs. PM’s decide on resource allocation and they have a key role to play in deciding which locations, and countries to set up in. It’s a strategic role to play and it’s an influential role as part of our nation’s strategy to seek higher-end jobs and it’s absolutely one of the areas we should be putting additional focus on.”

Lucey says there are three specific ways in which the chapter can help project managers attract more FDI into Ireland.

“People are not aware of how successful PM is in this country and how well recognised we are internationally, so one thing is getting that message out to people here.

Secondly, internationally we need to let people know what we do. In the last two years, we [PMI] have travelled to international conferences and have spoken at those events. I spoke in Athens and will speak in Malmo next month, letting people know what we do. There is no point in hiding our light under a bushel. The Irish tend to downplay their achievements and if you compare the Irish psyche with the American psyche, if I said to an Irish PM, ‘how is your project going’, the response would be, ‘not too bad’. Say the same thing to an American PM and the response would be ‘amazing’. We have to make sure we don’t let that hold us back.

“Thirdly, we need to be a little bit more active in terms of lobbying our public representatives in order to recognise the importance of PM. This was the first year we put in a submission regarding the budget, identifying four to five ways the Government could take small steps to help the profession and as a result help to attract more investment into the country.”

Lucey says there are other reasons Ireland is attractive to multinationals.

“I spent the first 20 years of my working life working for multinationals in Ireland and one of the big attractions was Ireland as a location to manage projects because we share a few working hours with the US and India, for example. I have teams running projects in Ireland who are dealing with people in Asia in the morning and the US in the evening.

“Also, as an island-trading nation and as a nation of storytellers, we’re very good at interacting and are good at the soft skills, the influencing and negotiating, which is a key part of PM. The ability to communicate well and negotiate in a friendly way is a very important skill that we have.”

In terms of project managers gearing up successfully for Brexit, Niall Murphy says: “Project managers for a particular organisation can analyse what are the possible outcomes and steps that should be taken to capitalise on potential opportunities or mitigate any downside. They’re good at risk analysis and if you need to take action, they can prepare a course of action for that.

“Setting up a company is another classic project, nothing exists, you have to create something and that may very well happen when Brexit happens. We may need to set up companies in Ireland to transfer some portions of business from London, for example, so the project-management discipline is used to get new entities up and running.”

Lucey agrees that we must be able to convince large banking organisations that we can show joined-up thinking, in terms of transport infrastructure, housing, as well as high-tech broadband and the staff to meet their needs. “PM is all about joined-up thinking and we must be able to show that,” he says.