Nearly three quarters (72%) of CEOs/ COOs and project managers identify the ability to manage projects as critical or absolutely critical to the future growth of the business, according to a study conducted by ERP provider IFS and the International Project Management Association (IPMA).
This IFS research surveyed 273 respondents across the USA, UK, Australia, Scandinavia and Benelux, comprising 49% CEOs/COOs and 51% project managers.
Respondents surveyed are from energy/utilities, telecom, oil & gas, construction and manufacturing sectors.
The survey revealed that just 11% of CEOs/ COOs and project managers are very confident of their ability to manage business critical projects in the most efficient way.
Only one quarter of businesses surveyed have fully integrated IT systems for project management and just 12% of all businesses are very confident they have full visibility of information to run projects effectively despite identifying IT integration and real time data as priorities for project control
According to the survey, 66% of respondents quizzed agreed that post-recession, enterprise software tools have become even more important to run projects than ever before.
IFS CEO Alastair Sorbie said that the change is the nature of projects, flexibility and scalability in project-based offerings is crucial to project success.
"Together with achieving a holistic view, where businesses have full visibility, control and insight into real-time data tracking, this is vital to manage the new generation of mission-critical projects, and to future organisational growth," Sorbie said.
IFS said that both the C-Suite executive leaders and project managers questioned agreed that the top three most important factors for consistent and efficient project management were resource planning (55%), integrated enterprise systems (52%) and real-time data (47%).
These results mirrored organisational IT and project-based solution investment priorities with 49% stating integration of IT as top priority.
Real-time data (40%) was the next priority, followed by resource planning (37%).
