According to the Resource Based View of the firm, strategic assets contribute to a firm’s competitive advantage. Strategic assets are characterized as Valuable, Rare, Inimitable, and they involve Organizational Support. These four characteristics have been theorized to result in competitive parity, temporary competitive advantage, or a sustainable competitive advantage for a company. This paper examines the relationships between key project management assets and these project management process characteristics using data from a survey of North American Project Management Institute® members. Findings from an analysis of the data suggest that intangible project management assets are a source of temporary competitive advantage while tangible project management assets are not. These findings highlight the importance of identifying and managing intangible project management assets for practitioners and scholars of project management.
Project management, including the tools, techniques, and knowledge-based practices applied to manage the creation of products and services, is becoming an increasingly accepted and applied discipline across industry sectors. This paper is motivated by the belief that practitioners and scholars of project management can benefit from understanding how project management can be leveraged as a source of competitive advantage for a company. To this end, the paper presents an analysis of the relationship between key project management assets and the project management capability of the firm drawing on the Resource Based View of the firm from the field of strategic management and using data gathered from an online survey of a random sample of North American Project Management Institute® members.
In the Resource Based View of the firm, a company has a bundle of assets (resources) such as human resources (individual skills and knowledge), financial resources (money), physical resources (equipment), social resources (network of contacts), and organizational resources (structure, processes, and relationships) [1]. Assets can be tangible (concrete and physical) or intangible (tacit, unspoken but understood; e.g., knowledge-based assets) [2]. Only a subset of a company’s assets, classified as strategic assets, is a source of its competitive advantage [3]. These strategic assets that contribute to competitive advantage involve explicit and tacit knowledge [4], [5], [6] and [7] that is embedded in a company’s unique internal skills, knowledge, resources, and ways of working [8] and [9].
The VRIO framework of competitive advantage has emerged from this perspective as a useful way of characterizing strategic assets [10] and [11]. In this framework, strategic assets are those assets which are Valuable (economically important, that is, they make money for the company), Rare (unique, meaning that few companies have these resources), Inimitable (hard to copy, meaning that it can be costly to duplicate them and difficult to figure out what other companies are doing to have such strategic assets), and they have Organizational Support (strong management support and processes and systems to support the assets).
This paper reports on findings from a study that was designed to examine project management using the Resource Based View of the firm and the VRIO framework. It addresses the following question: How are tangible and intangible project management assets related to the project management capability of the firm? Tangible and intangible project management assets are the independent variables and project management capability is the dependent variable in this paper. Drawing on the VRIO framework, process capability is defined in this study as the achievement of the characteristics valuable, rare, inimitable, and having organizational support in the project management process (VRIO characteristics).
The sections of the paper that follow provide an overview of the literature, a theoretical model and associated hypotheses linking project management assets to the achievement of VRIO characteristics of the project management process, the data collection and analysis methodology, a discussion of the results, conclusions, and the implications of the findings for practice and future research.
