Overseeing the internal projects- A systemic approach

Organizations undertake projects for their own needs, which they finance as investments. These projects are very diverse, from the design and industrialization of a new product to be marketed, to the installation of a production system, the reorganization of services or a major asset maintenance operation. They are called "internal projects".

The managers who will be responsible for justifying the investment in terms of the value delivered by the project, or the users who will be responsible for the project's outcome, cannot afford to lose interest. They need to have a supervisory role over the aspects they perceive as essential.

Internal projects are more or less precisely defined when they are launched, more or less linked to the organization's strategic challenges, and more or less disruptive to the balance of power. As a result, some parts of these projects cannot be delegated to project managers, and have to be handled by functional departments, or even senior management.

Project activities and the organization's strategic activities are intertwined. Balances must be found in the use of resources and strategic attention for projects and operational activities.

To achieve this, people in management positions need to develop an understanding of the project, its management and what is essential for its success. Systems science, which offers tools for making the complex intelligible, is a suitable approach.

Information needs to be passed on at the right time to decision-makers, who are often not project specialists and sometimes have little time to devote to projects. To deal with this complexity, the article draws on the principles of agile management, which are outlined and applied to internal projects.

Supervision of internal projects requires specific concepts and recommendations, some of which have been integrated into project management bodies of knowledge over the years. At the outset, in the 1970s, these corpuses were limited to basic project management activities (planning, planning follow-up and content validation). This approach corresponded to the needs of engineering companies. They needed staff trained in monitoring project implementation, while other skills were learned through experience. Then, the corpus gradually expanded. Other areas of project management were included, with an increasing focus on the particularities of agile management, such as communication and stakeholder management. Secondly, the recommendations for project management have taken into account the activities of the entity in charge of providing resources and to which the project manager reports. Finally, the evolution of the project's supporting elements and the management of...