Projecting Better Practice
Bringing good international practice to Thailand has been helped in many industries by the influx of foreign companies and personnel. A key focus in modern business, in any discipline, is project management. Jon Russell looks at the current status of this particular skill set in Thailand today.
Owing to its versatility and its adoption in a range of different industries the discipline of project management is difficult to define in specifics. One thing for sure is that project management has become an intrinsic part of developed business practice today.
“The diversity of project management makes it an important discipline for anyone with any responsibility for managing in a business environment”, says Matthew Bruggen, a director at High Point Asia, a specialist project management, software development and IT governance organisation.
In Thailand, the discipline is applied across a vast range of industries though it is more common to find project management, and project management professionals within the IT, finance, mergers and acquisitions and construction sectors.
According to Bruggen, the standard of project management in Thailand varies massively. Smaller business with local reach tend to adopt traditionally Thai approaches while bigger, corporate firms, operating with larger budgets, have a more obvious need for the organisation and structure of project management.
Local Drawbacks
Peter Walker, senior partner at Grant Thornton, a Bangkok based professional services firm, recognises that, despite the benefits on offer, many business shun project management, adopting a more traditionally Thai approach instead.
“A number of Thai industries have less project management sophistication,” comments Walker, “in particular Thai management techniques focus on the short-term, solving problems on a day-to-day basis with minimal control or reporting.”
Michael Sypsomos, president of the Bangkok chapter of the Project Management Institute (PMI), and president of The Mentor Group, a project management coaching consultancy in Bangkok, cites the example of a major Thai firm who completed a USD 450 million project two years late at a cost of USD 1 billion as an extreme example of the issues Thai projects and business can experience.
