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When George Stephenson built a railway from Liverpool to Manchester in the 1820s, it cost 45% more than budget and was subject to several delays as it made its way across the treacherous Chat Moss bog. In the intervening 180 years the management of large-scale projects seems to have improved but little. At the end of May the reconstruction of Wembley Stadium, the hallowed home of English soccer, was threatened when Multiplex, the Australian developer of the site, admitted that it faced mounting losses on the ￡ 750m($1.4 billion)project. Greg Balestrero, the head of PMI, says that for years project management was largely ignored. But that is now changing. A recent PMI survey found that three out of four European companies employ project managers. When Compaq, a computer maker, was taken over by Hewlett Packard in 2002, it had some 1,400 on its payroll. Three years ago the board of Siemens launched a worldwide initiative to improve its project management. The German electronics group had worked out that half its turnover came from project-like work, and it calculated that if it could complete all of these projects on time and to budget, it would add ￡ 3 billion($3.7 billion)to its bottom line over three years. A key element of the scheme was the introduction of project managers to the company's sales teams to try and temper their more extravagant promises, a move that requires a careful balance between reining them in and killing the deal. Some companies have gone so far as to become more like project co-ordinators than producers of goods or services. The "business-as-usual" bits of their operations have been outsourced, leaving them free to design and orchestrate new ideas. Nike, for instance, does not make shoes any more; it manages footwear projects. Coca-Cola, which hands most of the bottling and marketing of its drinks to others, is little more than a collection of projects, run by people it calls "orchestrators". Germany's BMW treats each new car "platform", which is the basis of new vehicle ranges, as a separate project. For all these firms, project management has become an important competitive tool. Some of them call it a core competence. Good project management can certainly make a difference. BP's fortunes were transformed when it converted its exploration division, BPX, into a portfolio of projects, each of them more or less free from head-office control—a structure which the company describes as an "asset federation". Asset/ project managers can no longer rely on head office for support. They are required to build their own self-sufficient teams.
单选题21.In the first paragraph the author infers that project management has______.