Benchmarking

Benchmarking is a self-improvement approach, a continuous improvement process aiming to understand, identify and adopt best practises from other organization and use it internally to improve different processes. It should be an essential part of the project planning and used during the actual work in monitoring to ensure continuous improvement.

"One of the biggest mistakes organizations make when first benchmarking is that they limit their benchmarking activity to their own industry. " Finding best practises from other (maybe very different) industries and adopt these to improve our organization or business is one possible way.

The studied research paper analyses "project management practises in four industries and identifies those which may be used as a benchmark for others." (Zwikael and Globerson, 2006)

I am not expert in any of the selected four industries, but I found that services are the closest to what I have been doing now for years - working with local governance, who are also service providers to their citizens - and in this paper I will examine how project management practises and planning can be improved in the services industry. I think it is important to underline that only previously recognized problems, shortcomings or weaknesses can be benchmarked with best practises in order to find possible answers to these.

Based on the authors' findings the quality of project planning is the highest in the construction and engineering field, as this industry is the most project oriented and project managers from the very beginning receive strong organizational support. This overall success results to reduce cost and to be able to successfully complete project before the deadline. Services industry is weak in providing organizational support to the project manager and to the project in the planning phase - even though this industry succeeded best quality in project planning by project managers. The project managers do not receive great support, because projects are not the main focus or the essential activities of organizations working in services industry. Similar projects are not frequently repeated - like in the construction industry - hence, the project manager rarely can rely on previously completed project or use recorded historical data. Lack of continuous and reliable organizational support has a negative impact on the performance of the project team and the manager. Project managers are often not provided with necessarily and up to date trainings, they have no opportunity to improve their overall work quality. More organizational - strategic and tactical support- would be required for project managers and project offices in order to be more successful.

Construction industry task duration estimates are likely the best, as they finish their projects with the lowest schedule overrun. As in this industry similar project are likely to be repeated several times, project managers have great experience estimating task, activity and project duration time