India Needs Project Management at Scale

Prashant Ranade believes India is at the cusp of greatness with the best performing economy in the world, consumption driven growth, robust democracy, strong institutions, and demographic advantage of a large young population.

But there is a risk of “blowing it” if certain fundamentals are not taken care of. An important factor to achieve the vision of a developed country is largescale adoption of project management. “India needs to adopt project management with a commitment to excellence and quality to attain the vision of a developed nation,” he said.

To capture the sentiments of the audience, he conducted a live poll on Twitter, the results of which he announced at the end of the session. Delegates overwhelmingly voted against the two poll questions: “Does India have an adequate number of project managers?” and “Does the current pool of project managers have the necessary skills?” The results reaffirmed Mr. Ranade’s argument that India needed to improve its project management capabilities.

“Vision India, whether it’s Swachh Bharat, Make in India, or Beti Bachao Beti Padhao, is aligned to a higher purpose. All these programs will need project management as scale to achieve that purpose,” he said, adding that the biggest challenge is not technology but people and culture. “At the junior level, we’re too compliant; at senior level, we break rules,” he said.

He exhorted delegates to pick the good aspect of “jugaad”, which is to simplify a solution, and discard the part that compromises quality by taking a short cut.