DPPM or Deep Pockets Project Management is a concept where companies spend disproportionately high amounts on their projects. Project costs are often inflated by at least a factor of 2-3 times the estimates.
DPPM is usually done to alter the business cases and the company’s financial exposure in such projects. For instance, an infrastructure project is inflated to absorb for potential delays, uncertainties, financing costs, kick-backs, managing user groups, or even making the project eligible for government incentives by qualifying them as large value or mega projects. Most importantly, they minimize the owner stakeholder’s own equity in the project. These projects are not always ‘mega’ in nature, but the financial ‘engineering’ of the constituent elements force the overall outlay to be much larger than it ought to be. Therefore, it is important to differentiate between DPPM and Mega Projects Project Management methodologies. Of course, it is almost always seen that MPPM is also a DPPM scenario. But this isn’t necessarily the case.
Typically, such projects have reasonable risks and potentially large uncertainties throughout their life cycle. The durations are usually within 3 years, unlike Mega Projects that operate beyond that horizon. This is mainly due to the political exposure that they deal with. These political factors could be both internal as well as external to the organization. For instance, a nuclear power plant might get stalled due to protests from certain local stakeholder groups. Such challenges are not always uncommon.
In such projects, the criticality seldom lies in the challenges to execute the work. Implementation options are plenty, but the more critical aspect is in managing the political constellation. Therefore, the companies aren’t particularly too rigid about the execution methodology and their initial budgets. The sustenance of such projects depend on the availability of large contract partners. Typically, one would see very large organizations working on these projects.
Often times, political constellations start meddling with implementation options and the project starts moving into sub-optimal business conditions. Many large projects are plagued with this phenomenon and they become excessively delayed with cost overruns and/or acquisition targets for competitors.
The project managers have to rely on multiple skills, that go way beyond traditional project management theory in such DPPM scenarios. One of the most crucial aspect here is, therefore, the need to have good audits of the projects. Consulting Connoisseurs can help assess the conditions of the project for the stakeholders in a substantial way. For a sum of USD 500, companies can get a complete review of how their project reports are being managed and how future surprises can be averted as far as possible.
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