pm-lotus by Howard Vaughan

Posts Tagged ‘Strategy’

Project Management and Culture - not always love at first sight

One of the most critical success factors in implementing project management is ensuring the right fit of processes and systems with the culture of the organization. Yet culture is such a wonderfully complex and seemingly amorphous thing that it can be hard to know what “fit” really means if we can’t define the characteristics and boundaries of the firm’s culture.

The Re-Engineering Alternative by William Schneider provides both a fascinating insight into organizational culture as well as a practical toolkit for determining your own company’s core culture. This is not a new book but it is a gem. Designed as an aid to improving organizational effectiveness by leveraging cultural norms and behaviors, Schneider describes how peeling back the layers of any organization will yield one of four dominant culture types.

Understand Your Culture

Each culture is defined in fine detail by comprehensively describing the leadership and management styles, strengths and weaknesses, structure, relationships and decision-making attributes that characterize them. Discovering the differences will help explain why organizations operate the way they do and, by extrapolation, why project management has to be tailored to be sustainable. Schneider terms the cultures as:

• Control - structured, domineering, task-oriented
• Collaboration - trust-based, empowering, people-centric
• Competence - achievement-oriented, impersonal, excellence-driven
• Cultivation - potential-fulfilling, creative, informal

If you’ve worked in a variety of culturally diverse organizations, you’ll quickly recognize the distinctive traits of each of these four cultures that are described in the book so clearly and with plenty of examples.

Culture Limits Execution of Strategy

As Schneider rightly points out, culture limits strategy. And since culture sets expectations, priorities, managerial practices and communication patterns, it also limits the execution of strategy – and therefore projects. Culture ultimately defines how work is planned, organized and managed – which is why it is such a crucial consideration in any effort to improve enterprise project management.

Getting there - slowly

It’s good to see more organizations finally getting serious about project portfolio management. But why is it taking so long? While all the process elements have been understood by an enlightened few for many years, progress in putting portfolio management into widespread practice has been disappointingly lethargic.

The reality is that most organizations have a great deal to do to make portfolio management work for them. Meaningful portfolio management standards and usable software applications have been painfully slow to emerge. In addition, several pitfalls often derail implementation efforts. Here are four of the biggest:

Lack of Ownership

Managing a portfolio is the responsibility of executives and this is a message that does not always get driven home. Portfolio management provides the crucial linkage of project work with strategy and ultimately the enabler of that strategy. It is not just another level of tactical project management. Executives have to take ownership, get firmly involved and be supportive.

Ineffective Process

In the same way as projects need some form of process to facilitate successful execution, a portfolio requires a structured methodology for establishing oversight procedures, prioritizing projects, balancing resource capacity and demand, and optimizing project funding, scoping, integration, sequencing and resourcing for strategic value. Portfolio management is a discipline.

Mismatch with Maturity

Often lost in the conversations about project prioritization frameworks and strategic alignment is the simple fact that without solid planning and tracking at the individual project level, portfolio management can never achieve its primary goals. Proper portfolio management needs proper project management.

Misalignment with Culture

Portfolio management, like project management, is scalable. It has to be designed to fit the organization’s culture and the way in which decisions are made and work gets done. Misaligning the intensity of portfolio information needs, analysis and control with a firm’s culture is a guaranteed showstopper. Each activity should not only deliver real value – it has to be widely supported.

The Good News

On a positive note, portfolio management is getting increased executive level attention. There is a realization that the option to “Do Nothing” incurs a very significant cost in unrealized strategies, overstretched and demoralized project teams, a lack of knowledge and control over what’s really going on, and dissatisfied customers. No longer can organizations afford not to respond. The call to action is gaining traction.

All good portfolio managers know that their organization should select and value projects with respect to its chosen strategies. This is intuitively rational given that strategy lays out future direction and projects exist to transform that vision into reality by satisfying needs for change and improving on what was or what is.

Blue Ocean or Misty Ocean?

The reality however is that core company strategies are oftentimes not widely communicated, or at least, they are not well understood across the organization. I confess this does not make much sense to me. Why spend time conceiving Blue Ocean strategies or creating Balanced Scorecards if the outputs (and importantly, the consequences for project work) are not plainly articulated to all? (Ok, I’m forgetting the cost reduction or downsizing strategy which tends to be conveyed without much ambiguity).

The Future is Now

There are some exceptional standouts of course – I once consulted at a global bank that had its core strategies posted on everyone’s cubicle – but in the main I meet disturbing numbers of managers and PMO staff who readily confess that their organization’s strategies are pretty much invisible or at best opaque. (When I hear this, my mind heads off into scenes from the visionary 1927 movie “Metropolis” which portrays a segregated world of workers slaving underground, achieving goals without vision, while the ruling elite above the surface – the Thinkers – make grand plans without knowing how things work).

Without clear strategy, we have no context of purpose. The entire organization needs context of purpose. Purpose inspires. Without clear strategy, good ideas and smart programs cannot be developed, projects cannot be optimally aligned, evaluated and prioritized, and resources cannot be effectively mobilized and motivated.