Crisis Management vs. Project Management

Due to my recent involvement with the medical community in Hong Kong, I had the chance to speak to clinical and nursing staff of several hospitals. One frequent question raised during those occasions is whether project management skills can be applied to crisis situation, such as that they are facing right now in the form of H1N1.

My short answer is no. It is true crisis management is closer to project management than to operation management, and some attributes of a good project manager are directly applicable to the situation of a crisis. However there are some characteristics of a crisis that are substantially different from those of a project.

Let’s look at the following table:

Crisis	Project	Operation
Unique mission but key objectives may change	Unique and well defined mission and objectives	Well defined objectives that are slow changing, if at all
Accomplish key objectives at all costs	Trade-off among scope, cost, time, quality & risk	Cost is usually the no. 1 objective
Dynamic team structure and resources	Heterogeneous & well defined team structure	Homogeneous and steady team
No definite end date – sometimes fluid schedule	Definite start and end dates – well defined time schedule	Ongoing with no specific end date

A lot have been said about the differences between project and operation so we are not going to repeat here. Let’s just focus on crisis management and project management.

To be continued...

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