Reflection on “Competitive Edge by Gale, December 2011”

The article “Competitive Edge” is discussing a set of best practices for project management, and how those can help the company to develop a competitive edge that can be very hard for other competitors to copy, and so gives the firm a touch of originality. To be ahead of competitors, companies have to monitor how they are doing, and keeping a close eye on the marketplace and customers’ wants, needs, and demands; that will give the company the needed flexibility to factor the new information gathered into the project plan, for example including a new feature for a particular product, or adding more resources to a project.

As part of the on-going project management process, project managers should keep reviewing market research, analyzing customers’ reactions and the other competitive intelligence in that particular industry, knowing that such practices can effectively minimizing risks. Project managers should always keep the feedback channels open, especially with the customer; that can identify unmet needs. One of the best ways to get feedback from customers these days is social media; however, the information collected from such resources has to be backed up by a formal research, and by sharing that, value will be added to the process, knowing that a good project manager will build time into the project’s schedule from the beginning, since that can increase the project's chances of success.

Some of the lesson learned from this article are that watching other industries can be very helpful, for example, many of the of the technologies used for remote monitoring and running complex systems are used by both of energy industry as well as healthcare industry. Additionally, a great way to have an access to the customers’ feedback and reviews is by including marketing and sales departments in the project, especially in the planning process.

This article talked about social media, and the feedback and information that can be gathered through those huge online data platforms. We are all using at least one of the social media platforms, sharing our personal information that can be used to analyze our behavior as consumers. Social medial made it possible to gather data, analyze it, categorize customer bases, and targeting customized markets.

I personally, used Google Ads to promote one company that I work with, and this tool does a great job in measuring the traffic on the website, and identifying characteristics about customer; social media is truly revolutionary. But on the other side, this tool is threating my privacy as customer, because it shares my personal information with other companies without taking any permission. Now, if you text a friend asking about a particular product on Whatsapp, advertisement about that product will be appearing to you when you check your Facebook account! The company that owns both applications insists that it is not doing anything to violet our privacy, but that is not true; one day will come, and Facebook will find itself facing serious charges in court!