CHAPTER 3

Advancement for Business—Strategic Implementation

Objectives

Business survival is dependent on advancement in a strategic direction

How does energizing the systems build value?

How does organizational culture matter for business advancements?

How does the project management approach breed culture, support creativity and innovation, and do away with complexity for high performance?

How can advancements be made for organizational change assessment for building competence?

With leadership at every level as the driving force, how can impacts be managed in the right direction?

The project management approach is facilitated through the following process:

•Capturing the POWER of Project Management for Strategic Advancement

•Developing Organizational Cultures

•Energizing the Systems

•Creativity and Innovation

•Leading Out of the Complexity Wilderness

•Impacts of Leadership

•Organizational Change Assessment

 

A study by the Economist Intelligence Unit reveals that the reasons for the failure of strategic implementation are the following:

 

Strategic Failure

Development of strategy, which is comparable to looking into the future, is highly challenging, but its implementation to capture the benefits of business advancement is even more challenging. The best-laid strategies become useless without proper implementation. This is far from straightforward; however, strategy is, by its nature, conceptual and often complex. Why good strategies fail: Lessons for the C-suite, an Economist Intelligence Unit report, sponsored by the Project Management Institute (PMI), addresses how C-level executives engage in the implementation of strategies. It explores the barriers that impede the integration of strategic initiatives in business operations.

The following are its findings:

 

•Senior executives recognize the importance of strategy implementation, but a majority admitted that their companies fall short in competence.

•C-suite executives are often missing in action.

•Rather than micromanaging, C-suite executives should identify and focus on the key initiatives and projects that are strategically relevant.

•A majority of companies either lack the skills or fail to deploy the personnel needed for strategy implementation.

•Success results from working at implementation in a variety of ways, but the financial rewards justify the effort.

 

“It should not be a question of developing a strategy and hoping it works, but of developing a strategy and following a logical plan to reach it.”

Lawrence Hrebiniak, Professor Emeritus Department of Management, The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania

Ensuring a tight linkage between strategy development and how that translates operationally is a challenge. But in effective companies they are integrated in a holistic way...People should see these steps as part of a continuum.”

Jeff Austin,

DuPont Pioneer

 

Strategic Implementation

As in football, and most other sports, perfect metaphors are available for business success, and lessons can be learned regarding the necessary combination of strategy, tactics, and execution. These create champions in business just as they do in athletics and are equally applicable to business advancement. The following are some of them.

 

1)Strategy: Never fails in the design

When a team has a significant lead in a game, it is obvious that the initial strategy was correct.

 

2)Tactics: Never fail until executed

The tactics identified to be part of the “game plan” to move the strategy forward seem great on paper, but until executed in the field of play against real competition, you’ll never know.

 

3)Execution: Ultimately determines success

At least 90 percent of the time, execution determines success on the athletic field. The investment in scouting the opposition to know tendencies provides more than enough information to create a strategy with a tactical game plan to ensure success. The difference between winning and losing lies in how each team executes at critical junctures in the game.

When you look to build a “championship” project team, here are three questions you should be asking:

 

A)Have you invested enough time to create a “championship strategy” you’re confident will get you where you want it to be?

B)Have you designed the tactical game plan that will allow you to move consistently toward your objectives? Do those tactics include consistent performance management processes to track progress and make corrections?

C)Are you confident about the competence of the team members to effectively execute the tactics on the “field of play” that are necessary to fulfill the strategy?

 

Strategy, tactics, and execution—all three components must come together at the right time to create a championship performance equally in business and in sports to reach success.

 

Requirements for Strategic Advancement. C-suite executives recognize that strategy implementation is fundamental to sustain competitiveness, perhaps even more so than strategy formulation itself. Yet they admit to poor performance in this area. Worse still, the C-suite often looks the other way, not providing the appropriate resources, prioritization, and attention. There is no single route to improvement. In an endeavor to improve strategy execution, the organizations may achieve a marked competitive advantage through a range of steps such as the following:

 

•Increase C-suite attention to implementation.

•Focus C-suite activity on the correct areas.

•The C-suite’s role includes prioritization of initiatives and allocation of resources.

•Integrate implementation and strategy formulation.

•Focused approach to strategic implementation.

•Develop the necessary skills throughout the organization.

•Talent management.

 

All of these measures give strategy implementation the importance it deserves, and organizations fail or fall short of their potential not because of bad strategies, but because of a failure to implement good ones.”

 

3.1 Capture the POWER of Project Management for Strategic Advancement

Applying project management principles and practices helps build strong organizational culture that drives strategic advancement, meets business needs, and sustains growth. The culture grows out of values and practices of effective leadership.

Culture is critically important to support business advancement and sustained success, according to 84percent of the more than 2,200 global participants in the 2013 Culture and Change Management Survey Report-“Culture’s role in enabling organizational change”

Source: http://www.strategyand.pwc.com/reports/cultures-role-organizational-change

Findings also suggest strong correlations between the success of change programs and whether culture was leveraged in the change process—pointing to the need for a more culture-oriented approach to change. However, there is a clear disparity between the way organizations view culture and the way they treat it. Less than half of the participants saw their companies managing culture effectively, and more than half said a major cultural overhaul was needed.

When project management principles and frameworks are in force for the advancement to strategic direction in an organization, it helps the development of infrastructure for collaborative leadership, change management, and systems for continuous improvement.

Project management approaches are leadership intensive; they essentially drive change management, which is leadership driven and carried out with lessons learned.

Culture is an outgrowth of effective leadership and may be shaped to meet organizational needs. The dynamic interplay between leadership and culture is critical. Culture drives the success of the organization imbued with business values. Delaying the focus on culture until after you become successful actually sentences you to a culture of mediocrity. This, in turn, reduces your capability to succeed. It’s a negative “lever.”

A conscientious focus on culture not only removes this negative lever, but may also replace it with a positive lever when you do it right. And, unlike products and strategies, which are quickly copied, the cultural advantage has more sustainable power and uniqueness. The fact that it is complicated and challenging means that any advantage you achieve over the competition is difficult for competitors to match.

A toxic culture may doom the greatest strategy. The requirement lies in caring more about “what’s right” than “who’s right.” The disciplined and structured functioning of project management processes builds organizational infrastructure to help define leadership functions with clarifying roles and responsibilities and providing transparency in actions. The continued practice of collaborative leadership leads to the creation of high-performance cultures. These are essentially strengths-based cultures with a strong base of evolving knowledge, processes, and best practices.

The project management approach in practice develops a culture that comprises the following four dimensions, also presented in Figure 3.1:

Figure 3.1 Cultures from a project management approach

1.Collaborative leadership

2.Organizational learning

3.Change management

4.Project management practices

 

Together, all of these aspects of project management culture synergize into a strengths-based organizational culture.

 

3.2 Develop Organizational Culture

Project management practices provide the values and behaviors that contributeto the unique social and psychological environment of an organization, which in turn helps in the development of a results-driven, high-performance culture.

Project management provides the infrastructure for practicing effective leadership. Project and program implementation are leadership intensive, driving results essentially through change management, which is managed by effective leadership. Capturing lessons learned and creating systems for learning organization is also driven by effective leadership. The leadership skills are managed for each team member to help enhance competence, from self-leadership to all higher levels of the hierarchy.

Organizational culture developed from project management practices help in the enhancement of expectations, result-oriented experiences, philosophy, and values that hold the organization together. These practices are expressed in self-image, the inner workings of an organization, interactions with the outside world, and future advancements. They can be seen in:

 

•the forceful way business is conducted and the ways in which team players, customers, and stakeholders are treated

•the freedom in decision making for project implementation

•defined communication channels and the flow of information in the portfolio

•how collective objectives are pursued in a portfolio for common goals

 

Organizational culture is unique for every organization and needs conscientious efforts to change it. The cultures stemming from project management are discussed in what follows:

 

Project Management Practices Culture

The project management framework and systems facilitate clarity, transparency, and enhanced governance and control at all levels, working together for the advancement to strategic goals.

Professional culture is important to guide members of a profession to work inline with established standards and methodologies. Project management, as a new profession, has its own professional culture, which is minimally defined as a set of work-related values, knowledge, and beliefs shared by project management professionals. Four key dimensions of project management culture are professional commitment, project team integration, work flexibility, and viewing others in terms of work performance.

The mind-set for understanding and pursuing the basic values leads to the formation of project management culture, which includes the following:

 

•Application of project management framework, practices, processes, and methodology

•Disciplined implementation of projects in line with the strategic goal

•Team is built on “the right person for the right job” with defined roles and responsibilities

•Trust in power of project management practices for advancement to desired results

•Consistency in defined values, agreement, and coordination for togetherness

•Identification of needs and training of team members for direction and skills

•Openness and adaptability for creative and innovative response to change

 

Project Leadership Culture

Creating Leadership Culture

Each team member is encouraged to practice self-leadership and enhance leading capabilities inside out. The clarity of roles and responsibilities for collaborative endeavors toward a common goal is the essence that creates leadership culture.

Project implementation is a leadership-intensive undertaking. The central role of leadership in project management is to encompass roles at every level in a coordinated and structured manner. This builds a leadership culture where everyone demonstrates leadership behavior and takes the right action at the right moment with practice in:

 

•Coaching and mentoring

•Empowerment

•Critical applications of leadership skills

•Development of leadership foundations

oUnderstanding of self

oUnderstanding of others

oAbility to communicate to motivate

oWell-defined personal vision

•Development of managerial skills

oTechnical or process skills

oManagement skills

oDifferentiate between managerial and leadership skills

 

Leadership is really not about leaders themselves. It’s about a collective practice among team members to work together—accomplishing the choices they make together in mutual work. The essence is learning for self-leadership and moving to leadership roles at any level. Project management helps organizations to have double-loop (best practices and driving human factors) learning; culture cannot be fixed merely by fixing mistakes; it is also important to see what creates mistakes.

Project management supports collective leadership, an emerging approach adapted to achieve the goals of a portfolio by all project managers and teams for advancement. When team members work together for a common goal, human, cultural, and technological resources are mobilized in way that improve steam performance for desired outcomes. It is inherently an inclusive leadership approach where members cross boundaries such as differing beliefs, religions, and community cultures.

Collective leadership is a shift in approach from an exclusive focus on individual change agents to one that emphasizes the importance of collaborative advancements. The approach is based on the following:

Principles: Team members convincingly add value in strategic advancement. Teams that are fluid in nature evolve in response to commitments for advancement and achieving results; they are rooted in a commitment to the greater good.

Stages: Leaders move through a sequence of steps in the development process: get ready, plan, implement, and sustain. Building readiness is the first stage, in which the foundation is laid for all advancements. It involves finding a good fit between abilities and willingness. Planning begins with envisioning the desired goal and articulating the methodology to achieve it.

Practices: For better results, leaders need to focus on the following:

 

1.Fostering enthusiasm

2.Mobilizing resources

3.Self-leadership

4.Team mind-set, reflecting and learning

 

Project Change Management Culture

Project/program implementation is essentially change management where leadership plays a pivotal role in managing the human factors necessary for change. The only thing permanent in personal and organizational life is change, but humans are averse to change because of the fear of the unknown. Culture is developed to deal with addressing the what, why, when, where, and how primarily to pre-empt the fear factor. Change is implemented with established practices.

Project management essentially deals with change when the desired end results are known and works with future scenarios focused on implementation.

Program and project implementation is change management; it is a matter of learning to create an organizational mind-set that adapts to change quickly and easily. The organization becomes flexible yet capable of implementing and sustaining organizational change with a project management structure in place.

Deciding what to change is one thing; making changes stick is another.

The basic steps to follow:

 

1.Ensure the reason is real and understandable.

2.Educate all concerned for value and benefits.

 

Organizational Learning Culture

Project management structures support knowledge management in an organization for improvement and continued success. They help create a culture for learning in a systemic manner to capture lessons learned, encompassing learning from the industry, learning from advancements in technology/business knowledge, and learning at all levels in the organization.

A learning organization embeds a growth mind-set at all levels in the business. It measures performance, encourages learning, sees mistakes as an opportunity, and empowers team members to make decisions. It is not being knowledgeable and skilful that is rewarded, but rather the ability to learn, grow, adapt, and create results. A growth mind-set supports an organization to see training as the only path to the development of capabilities and embeds growth and improvement as a way of doing business.

Project management systems support a learning mind-set, which includes the following elements:

 

•The organization is in a constant state of innovation and improvement.

•Team members question and challenge process and methodology and feel comfortable having the tough conversations about where they and their teams need improvement (i.e., they are honest with themselves and with others).

•No one is considered “indispensable” (i.e., there is no status or personal power). Leaders are encouraged to take leave and let direct reports work in place. Meetings are never rescheduled; if a person cannot attend, a delegate must attend on their behalf (no dependency).

•The organization focuses on continuous improvement rather than budgets and targets.

 

Systems established to capture the dos and don’ts by experience in functional domains create a competitive edge. The lessons learned may encompass the following:

 

•Organizational learning from industry

•Learning from advancement in technology/business knowledge

•Capturing lessons learned at all levels in the organization, at the project/program/portfolio/EPMO levels

•Capturing lessons learned at the organizational level

 

It is clear that organizational learning is based on applying knowledge for a purpose and learning from the process and from the outcome. Brown and Duguid (1991) describe organizational learning as “the bridge between working and innovating.” This once again links learning to action, but it also implies useful improvement.

 

Project Management Culture Helps Organizational Culture

The project management structure, with its hierarchy of responsibilities, practicing leadership, and effective development of all dimensions of project management culture, turns into organizational culture—a force for high performance, as shown in Figure 3.2.

 

Figure 3.2 Creating organizational culture for strategic delivery

The organizational culture developed on knowledge strengths has a profound influence on the following:

 

•Energizing systems with innovation and creativity

•Leading the organization out of the complexity wilderness

 

3.3 Energizing the System

The system is energized with project management framework, managing human factors, keeping high fitness, governance, defined line of control and transparency in advancement. The teams working in such environments exhibit a high power of confidence in leadership.

The personal conviction with clarity of purpose, principled leadership, and transparency of responsibility in hierarchy of control and importance of input at a defined level synergizes into a mega-force for advancement. An individual’s powerful aura turns into a collective AURA of organizational leadership that profoundly prevails over general behavior in the work environment. The strengths of leadership are derived from the combined power of trust, enthusiasm, visionary advancement, change readiness, and principled actions.

Organizational transformation carried out in line with project management best practices brings the power of clarity to the following:

 

•Hierarchy of responsibility

•Transparency in actions

•Communication channels

•Purpose of initiative and connectivity with strategy

 

The teams engaged in strategic advancement knitted together with established best practices develop their sense of confidence. Effective and efficient leadership creates an emotional connection, building trust, loyalty, and the spirit of collective purpose toward a common goal.

The power of clarity coupled with individual, intensive leadership helps project teams to perform miracles.

A high-performing organization cannot go unnoticed; there is a palpable difference in the work environment, which is alive with enthusiastic and energized team members who have unity of purpose and work together to get things done.

 

3.4 Creativity and Innovation for Advancement

Project management frameworks provide the infrastructure for pursuing common goals and a reason to work together. When you want to drive innovation, just start cocreating.

Everyone wants to know how Google continually drives innovation within their organization. The secret is collaboration. Collaboration is a hot topic today because it is the key to successful innovation. If you want to succeed at fostering innovation in your organization, then you must make a deliberate effort to drive collaboration. How? Through cocreation.

Cocreation is a dynamic and creative process of collaborative innovation that has brought about breakthrough results in many Fortune 500 companies.

 

Innovation

How do innovative ideas arise? Science has shown that innovative ideas come from a source that is best known as intuition, and one can increase the ability to tap this source with increased engagement.

“Albert Einstein claimed that his discovery of the Theory of Relativity was based on an intuitive insight that came in a flash. In fact, most scientific discovery has been sparked through intuition” (http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/Goodies/Einstein_think/index.html).

Intuition of a future or remote event can be scientifically explained. However, the explanation first requires acceptance of a fact that is unconventional: Our perception of time and space is only an illusion, and quantum physics has proven that there is fundamentally no past or future and no here or there. This point is no longer in dispute within reputable scientific communities. Most of us have heard this stated, yet we haven’t internalized it. It is because of this that our intuition can access limitless information.

When a team focuses a passionate, emotional attention toward a nonlocal event of interest, such as a potential future business opportunity, this attunes their physiological and psychological systems to the energy radiating from the event. The wave of energy from the event contains information that the perceiver experiences as intuition. Experimentation shows that the heart receives the nonlocal information and then sends a corresponding signal to the brain. Successful entrepreneurs, more than the average member, are attuned to this energy.

 

Effective Ways for Innovation

Team players’ creativity and innovation are essential for success, particularly in times of economic challenges. There is a clear connection between team member engagement and innovation, according to a 2006 Gallup poll. Engaged members are more creative and more willing to accept innovative ideas from others. Most CEOs value creativity, and team players who are allowed to be creative are more engaged with their current positions. A company’s culture either fosters or stifles innovation. Fortunately, business leaders are learning to shape a more creative work environment with project management approaches. The following dynamics are required to bring it about:

 

Maintain Open Dialogue

Effective communication and dialogue motivate and engage team players. Allow them to present their ideas before important decisions are made. Provide feedback to members, even when their ideas are not used, so that they know that they are not being dismissed.

 

Engage Team Players

The project implementation process encourages sharing of creative ideas and does not limit creativity to special occasions. Team members are encouraged to continually share ideas with one other.

 

Encourage Communication: Collaboration

Project team members on different tasks often create solutions to problems. Collaborative communication facilitates trust and prevents conflict. Departments that do not communicate are more likely to blame each other when a problem arises.

 

No Forceful Innovation

Project management structures facilitate creativity through encouragement rather than force. Demanding teams to present ideas at certain times does not bring forth true innovation. The ideas may beget financial rewards, with opportunities for advancement; there are many other forms of incentives that are effective for advancement in challenges.

 

Flexibility and Forgiving

Any punishment for taking risks serves as a warning to others against the exercise of initiative for creativity or innovation. Inflexibility discourages innovation. Encourage team players to think outside the box, and implement ideas without interference; never punish when ideas are unsuccessful, but allow the team to fail, as it leads to learning and growth.

 

Keep Track of Innovations

Leaders keep track of past innovations to uphold the interest of management. Knowing the team player innovations and how successful they were presents a clear picture of the financial benefits of team player creativity. Keeping track of innovations also indicates whether any alterations need to be made to recently implemented programs or the organizational culture.

 

Creativity

Project management provides a supportive environment for creativity. The raw materials of a team are expertise and creative thinking. There is a third factor—motivation—that determines what team members actually do. All forms of motivation do not have the same impact on creativity. In fact, there are two types of motivation—extrinsic and intrinsic. The latter is far more essential for creativity. Project managers foster an internal social climate that is open and friendly, by ensuring transparency in responsibilities, challenging assignments, special reconnaissance and/or rewards to the most creative team players, a good internal up-down and down-up communications system, and by a general results-driven culture. The killing of creativity in organizations is basically due to the absence—or even the opposite—of such ingredients. The following help build a creative environment:

 

Freedom

The key to creativity is giving teams autonomy concerning the means—that is, concerning the process—but not necessarily the ends. Team members are more creative when given freedom to decide how to reach desired outcomes.

 

Challenge

Matching the right team member with the right assignment uses their expertise and skills in creative thinking and ignites intrinsic motivation.

 

Resources

The two main resources that affect creativity are time and money, and it is important to allot them carefully, Ensuring that the right team member is matched with the right assignments and deciding how much time and resources to provide to a team or project is a sophisticated judgment that can either support or kill creativity.

 

Work-Team Features

You must create mutually supportive teams with a diversity of perspectives and backgrounds. Why? Because when teams comprise people with various kinds of intellectual resources and approaches to work—that is, different kinds of expertise and creative thinking styles—ideas often combine and combust in exciting and useful ways.

 

Organizational Support

Creativity is truly enhanced when the entire organization supports it. Such support is the responsibility of the project/program/portfolio managers, who must put in place appropriate systems or procedures and emphasize values to convey the message that creative efforts are a top priority. Enhance creative thinking by exposing teams to various problem-solving approaches. With the exception of hardened misanthropes, information sharing and collaboration heighten teams’ enjoyment of work and thus their intrinsic motivation.

A creative environment demands that project/program/portfolio be shielded from political problems and that infighting, politicking, gossiping, and leg pulling are detrimental to team building and particularly to creativity that take away attention from work. An organization is required to manage the following three components, as part of their team-building activities, in the interest of sustaining creativity:

 

A)Expertise
The team member is required to have sufficient knowledge, skills and competence to carry out the assigned task

B)Creative Thinking
Conscientiously poised to find better and improved ways to reach the desired outcomes

C)Motivation
Intrinsically engaged in getting the work done and genuinely trust that the organization will recognize the achievement with rewards (Figure 3.3).

 

Figure 3.3 Components of creativity at work

Creativity and Innovation in the Workplace

The project management culture of organizations, both large and small, adopts the policies and practices that foster creativity and thereby promote innovation.

What is meant by creativity? And how can it be harnessed effectively?

 

Creative Environment

Project management helps foster an environment for creativity, that is, the mental and social processes used to generate ideas, concepts, and associations that lead to the exploitation of new ideas—or, to put it simply, innovation. Through the creative process, team members are tasked with exploring the profitable potential of an endeavor, which typically involves generating and applying alternative options to products, services, and procedures through the use of conscious or unconscious insight. This creative insight is the direct result of the diversity of the team—specifically, individuals who possess different attributes and perspectives.

It’s important to note that innovation is usually not a naturally occurring phenomenon. Instead, like a plant, it requires the proper nutrients to flourish, including effective strategies and frameworks that promote divergent levels of thinking. For example, by supporting an open exchange of ideas among team members at all levels, organizations are able to inspire personnel and maintain innovative workplaces.

Therefore, leaders must manage the creative process and not attempt to manage the creativity itself. The creativity typically does not occur exclusively in a team member’s mind but is the result of interaction within a social context where it’s codified, interpreted, and assimilated into something new. Within this system, incentives are helpful, ranging from tangible rewards, such as monetary compensation, to the intangible, including personal satisfaction and social entrepreneurship.

 

Creative Work Space to Foster Innovation

Project management helps establish a creative environment that takes more than just turning your team members loose and giving them free rein in the hope they’ll hit on something valuable. To operate effectively, the process of creativity requires the proper framework that will also enable management to evaluate the profitability of the results.

Approaches to foster innovation through creativity include the following:

 

•Project management helps create a stimulating environment. Teams are encouraged to access resources such as journals, art, games, and soon—some of which may not even be directly related to project tasks—that serve as sources of inspiration. In addition, structuring the work area by removing physical barriers between teams improves communication and promotes creative interaction.

•Reward efforts through positive psychological reinforcement. Encourage team members to take risks, rewarding them for creative ideas and not penalizing them when they fail. In doing so, you enable team members to more readily take on assignments that stretch their potential (and that of the organization), discussing in advance any foreseeable risks and creating the necessary contingency plan. Encourage team members at all levels to suggest ways and means of improving current processes.

•Foster different points of view through outside perspectives. Innovation can often spring from a review of how customers view and use your products and services. Soliciting opinions provides valuable insight into potential areas for improvement as well as areas where you’re succeeding (essential knowledge for positioning against competitors). Other perspectives include vendors, speakers from other industries, or consumers using a competitor’s products or services.

 

3.5 Leading Out of Complexity Wilderness

Project management leadership has established clarity, togetherness, and a harmonized structure for advancement to face the challenges that bring about complexity.

Project teams have a strong drive to progress, create, adapt, compete, and survive. All of these characteristics make them highly successful and adaptable, but they also result in changing and improving their surroundings as they strive to advance. In organizations, there are large numbers of teams, all seeking to progress. Resultantly, organizations quickly become highly complex, adaptive systems. Complexity increases, largely unconsciously, as teams seek to improve things, learn, progress, and satisfy their own needs and ambitions. It seems that, sometimes, one just cannot help making things more complicated!

The innate force to improve overpowers the motivation to simplify.

The following list is not exhaustive; one can probably think of other behaviors that create complexity. However, these examples illustrate that human behaviors and actions create complexity. This creates a frustrating paradox: Humans dislike working in overly complex systems where productivity slows down.

Some examples of common management behaviors that create complexity:

 

•Overintellectualizing, overengineering, reinventing. These behaviors make something more intellectual or more complex than it needs to be for the situation or the audience in question or creates a new way of doing something, when you already do it well elsewhere. This includes replicating existing products/services with unnecessary local adaptations.

•Mistrust. Lack of trust creates processes, reporting systems, and other management mechanisms ostensibly to control people or protect ourselves. You need to invest more time in enabling teams to do their jobs effectively . . . and then trust them to deliver.

•Tinkering. Tinkering involves making changes that reflect your personal preference for how something should be done—your way is probably different, but is it actually better? This behavior is also driven by a desire to stamp our mark on things.

•Avoidance. Focusing on the process or the politics rather than the real problem or issue at hand also adds to complexity. This creates a distraction that confuses teams about the real issue/problem.

•Lack of focus. Lack of focus includes focusing on too many small things, failing to look for, and/or prioritizing the bigger opportunities that create real value in your organization.

•Aimlessness. Failing to set a clear and/or correct destination from the very start; this leads teams to wander aimlessly in the wrong direction, or to duplicate activities.

•Perfecting. Avoid trying to make things 110percent perfect, when 100percent is good enough!

 

Remember that behaviors are a major driver of complexity; it follows that changing these behaviors (and, ultimately, changing corporate culture) is essential in the battle against complexity. Changing these behaviors will result in the removal of this pervasive problem of structural complexity, to be replaced with sustainable solutions derived from a culture or mind-set of simplicity.

PM-AURA (a model for maximizing project management culture) helps project managers truly value the power of simplicity every day to achieve the end game of embedding simplicity into organizational culture. It needs to be a consideration in everything project managers do. Teams habitually look for and choose the simplest way of doing things. When they redesign a process, they ease its integration into the system. When simplicity is part of the cultural mind-set, teams spot unnecessary complexity and immediately start thinking of ways to remove it. However, until you have achieved the goal of building simplicity into your culture, you need to constantly remind people to think about the issue.

Leadership is the most powerful lever of behavioral change. Leaders’ own words, actions, and behaviors are the most effective way to shift the cultural mind-set of an organization.

The behaviors are a key root cause, if not the root cause of complexity. So how can we change these behaviors to counter the complexity challenge? The answer is leadership and only strong leadership culture.

 

The Emergent Business Challenge!

How can organizational competence be enhanced to effectively implement and satisfy the changing demands of customers and all stakeholders with organizational dynamism to change, meeting changing requirements, and keeping the direction for strategic advancement?

The gap that businesses face is the difficulty of managing important challenges, where the focus remains on urgent matters of customer/stakeholder satisfaction and organizational matters such as building the capacity for dynamic change. That prevents the growth sustainability of an organization.

 

The Solution: “Common Sense”

The company mind has to think in a new way—not just conceiving new ideas but thinking from a different foundation. The imperative is to follow common sense, with a view that what’s natural is the yearning for growth, for creativity, for adventure. What’s natural is a desire for transformation. What’s natural is a passion for greater purpose. What’s natural is stepping up to meet the energies of changing times and elevating organizational mastery.

Effective project management frameworks, practices, systems, and processes may be applied in areas of the project organization for strategic advancement and growth sustainability. Project management strengths may be captured with the development of project management culture for high performance and dynamism for change.

The change is managed through HR, who are provided with an outlook on the future. According to Ram Charan, in a posting for the Harvard Business Review blog: “It is time to split HR into two.” Others, like Josh Bersin, disagree with Charan and think we should create “new and improved” programs such as talent rotation, transformation, foundation, and so forth. The challenges remain, as noted in the following list:

 

•The tragedy of the organizational complexity is that it feeds on itself; hence the need increases to rescue and further develop common sense.

•While it is important to know how we got here, it is a lot more important to discover how we can overcome this global problem and challenges.

•Although it is well known that the human factor (i.e., organizational structure) plays a vital role in the success or failure of every business, most business owners, organizational leaders, and business leaders have focused their efforts (and many tragically continue to do so) on the “shape” of their organizations (flat, horizontal organizations, matrix, cell, chaordic, etc.). They are spending invaluable resources such as time, energy, and money dealing with the symptoms through motivational workshops, coaching, recreational games, and so on, in the hope of achieving greater accountability, commitment, and creativity, while leaving intact the root of their problems (i.e., restrictive organizational DNA). Some even believe that workshops on “total quality,”“benchmarking,”“vision,”“leadership,”“empowerment,”“communication,”“coaching,” and so on suffice to obtain an ideal culture. However, if they do not first make a true and authentic DNA transformation of the prevailing organizational structure, these workshops and motivational games could be even more harmful.

 

3.6 Impact of Leadership

The impact is significant and can be both positive and negative. Great leadership drives high performance and increased profitability, while poor leadership can cause low morale, increased absenteeism, and poor performance.

A delicate balance needs to be maintained between the positive and negative sides of leadership impacts, and this requires the consistent and conscientious management of behavior. The balancing requirement itself poses challenges to the quality of leadership required for project management systems and advancement in increasing complexity.

One of the main problems with leadership is that people are promoted for technical proficiency and aren’t given the tools they need to become strong leaders. Recent research by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development has shown that 60percent of businesses cite leadership as the skill they need to develop in order to drive business forward.

Great leaders are able to adapt their style according to the situation and people they are managing. They need to have strong self-awareness and a high level of emotional intelligence so that they understand the impact that they have on others. They also need to create a culture of trust in their teams and be prepared to be vulnerable.

Leadership directly impacts engagement. The research on innovation and skills has found that engaged employees are 43percent more productive than disengaged employees. This makes it really easy to value the impact of positive and negative leadership in an organization.

To a large extent, an individual’s belief system is formed in the subconscious mind, which develops the belief that one is cut out for the best of things in life. Competency levels of people are almost the same, but it is the belief that gets transformed into behavior. When beliefs transform behavior, high performers are born.

All project professionals are not automatically great leaders because they took a few courses in project management, critical path schedules, resource planning, or objective setting. There isn’t a certification for leadership, nor is there a guaranteed development path one can follow to become an effective leader.

The collaborative leadership unleashes the power of project management for the advancement of business with unlimited benefits. It is a force for navigating in unknown waters and increasing environmental complexity.

 

Culture and Leadership—Project Management Structures

Culture is an outgrowth of leadership and helps to meet organizational goals. This dynamic interplay between leadership and culture is critical even if the most brilliant of strategies is in place.

Further culture-building aspects include the following:

 

Team Members

The more effectively team members are trained for “being intentional" in project management practices, leadership, change management, and organizational learning, the more likely culture will become the reality. Whatever orientation and training work is carried out, you should talk about the kind of culture you’re going after. Describe the way you’d like things to be working. Talk about the informal ways in which you envision the group working together, the way you want the customer experience to feel, and so forth. Finding commonality among team members will help with the following:

 

What are we trying to do?

What is the difficulty in the way?

What actions are most likely to ensure success?

Who is responsible and accountable for what and when?

 

The Defined Culture

You have a number of leaders running your project management structure who may not immediately have full agreement on what your desired culture is. In that case, there must be hard discussion among the key decision makers so that you may reach a consensus.

 

Being Persistent and Living It in Action

Achieving the desired result is focused, with necessary change in actions. Expect things to go on with adjustments in plan when necessary and drive on.

Putting the vision in writing is an essential element of making it successful. When the dialogue stays verbal only, it’s inevitable that everyone will leave the room with a different version of what was agreed upon. Documenting it is far more likely to help you get where you want to go.

 

Holding Integrity High

Honor your words at all times: say what to do and do what you say, to become trustworthy. Culture is very little about what we say, and very much about what we do. When we don’t live it, it’s never going to play out as we want it. Organizational culture takes time to build and does not follow a quick decision or writing of an order.

This is especially critical for the leaders in organizations; the team players see everything you do. Remind yourself that every action you take and every word you speak has an impact on how your organizational culture develops. Pretending that words, actions, and attitudes don’t have a significant impact would be to live in denial.

The influence of the leader is particularly strong when things are moving quickly, teams are operating at close quarters, usually under high stress, and behaviors have long-lasting effects.

The following are some of the meaningful ways in which leaders impact the culture:

 

•How well your words match your deeds

•How you handle things when they don’t match up

•Which of your values you live and which you only pay lip service to

•Whom you hire and whom you fire

•Whom you reward and whom you don’t

•The systems/recipes/processes you put in place

•How you handle failure

 

How you manage difficult situations is one of the biggest contributors to the creation of organizational culture. It’s easier to build a culture when everything is going well. But strong cultures are partially built during hard times. When money is tight, how do you act? When a staff member is ill, how do you respond? When a good customer can’t pay their bills, what do you say?

What’s different is how you handle it when you don’t live up to what you said. By openly accepting that you’ve erred, acknowledging what’s happened, apologizing for it, and then moving forward together, everything works more effectively. By handling problems in a constructive way, you are building the culture you want.

Ultimately, everybody needs to take responsibility to personally live the culture that is being created. No one will get there perfectly as individuals. The value of diversity is high when the following are included:

 

•Build a group/team that together embodies all the characteristics that are sought

•Actually handle that diversity with respect and inclusiveness, not divisiveness, when moving toward the organizational culture

•Measure It: Once the key elements of the desired culture are identified and written down, the success achieved in making them a reality must be measured.

•Reward It: A common problem in every organization is the mismatch between its stated expectations and the rewards it gives. In some cases, the issue is just an absence of rewards. Companies say that they want people to treat each other well, but those who do receive no recognition; they say that they want to have fun, but the only reward you get is... you’re having fun; they say that they want people to learn, but the only reward is that they attend a seminar without learning. The situation can be more extreme—some organizations actually reward cultural behaviors that reflect the values that are the opposite of what they say they’re seeking. They say they want to be generous but take for themselves first. They say that they want teamwork, but pay bonuses based on individual performance.

 

No organization will ever perfectly align every reward with the behaviors one seeks. But at least being cognizant of the key elements of the cultural vision you are pursuing and then making sure they are recognized and rewarded is important.

 

Changing an Existing Culture

There’s no quick fix that begets cultural change in a matter of days, weeks, or even months; it’s infinitely easier to rewrite a system to change the culture of an organization than to ensure the prerequisites of communication, persistence, relentless follow-up, and perseverance.

 

“Fact remain that you never get rid of the parts of the culture you don’t like”.

More realistically, what works is to gradually build up the strengths around the less desirable elements so that the problems become smaller impediments to getting to where you want to go.

The rule of thumb for effecting meaningful cultural change is that it takes 2 to 3 years to get something woven into what is done. By accepting that reality rather than fighting it, one can do a much better job of managing, leading, and supporting the change process. Leaders need to focus teammembers on the long-term vision and give encouragement and energy to get through the seemingly inevitable task of changing culture better to create a dominant project management culture by pursuing the AURA Model.

 

Handling Cultural Gaps

The reality is that even the most effective organizations will have gaps between the way they want things to be and the way people behave culturally. The emphasis needs to be placed on following the AURA approach as prescribed, and every task must be carried out in the same way, analogously to the speed limit on the highway. The speed limit signs say 70 miles per hour, but everyone knows that the “real speed limit is that you drive as fast as you want unless there’s a cop. Take note, of course, that these aren’t outlaws. They’re well-respected and upstanding citizens.

 

Different Cultures in Different Parts of the Organization

When your projects are not in the same place all the time—either because you have different locations, different departments, a big building, extended hours, or some combination of each—the result will be different cultures in different parts of the organization. That’s not alarming or a bad thing; it’s normal.

You may find different versions of culture across the various departments and locations; this is merely a human factor of preferences, work habits, and behaviors.

The key for leaders is not to fight against this diversity but rather to focus on the positive. What’s the vision of the culture, and how can it be realized? Given the lack of uniformity, which elements of the culture are most important? What vision of organizational culture are you embracing? What actions do you need to take to build the culture you have envisioned?

 

Losing What You Have While Building for the Future

This is a regular feature of organizations that have created the kind of culture that they sought early in their business development. Leaders and key long-time staff worry about protecting their culture as they grow. Although the concern is valid, you cannot stop evolution.

Growth is a positive thing. The question instead should be “Given the growth that you are going after and the way the world may change, what should the organizational culture look like in 5 years? By writing down the vision of the successful culture you will create, you are likely to get there.

Value and knowledge-based culture always prevail over the self-developed culture in an organization, and it is an added advantage with application of project management to have a strong culture manageable with evolution of knowledge for changing circumstances.

 

3.7 Organizational Change Assessment

Check Organizational Mind-set

Organizations want to achieve and maintain competitive advantage. When it comes to project management practices, not all organizations are doing what’s necessary to stand apart from competitors. Why? Some are stuck in a traditional mind-set.

For years, organizations have looked for competitive advantage through a traditional project management approach that is operational in nature and includes strict controls focused on schedules, budgets, and resources. However, sometimes even when projects meet controls (i.e., they’re completed on time and within budget), organizations don’t achieve competitive advantage through the expected benefits.

On the other hand, some innovative organizations are opting to evolve from an operational to an organizational project management (OPM) approach. This approach conceives of projects strictly as a means to achieve business objectives defined through the organization’s strategy. These organizations have a project and program management mind-set at their core. Because of that commitment, their projects meet original goals more often than the average organization.

 

Carry Out Organizational Time Travel

Organizations, knowing the power of project management, need to assess their time-travel standing and approach change management with common sense. It requires a strong commitment from top-level managers to transform an organization from what it is into what it wants to be, merely because failed projects may result in financial losses for an organization, and a failed strategic initiative has an impact far beyond just the financials. When an organization embarks on change, it’s likely that systems, processes, vendors, and perhaps even the overall organizational mind-set will be impacted. Failure to successfully enable sustainable change leaves organizations losing their competitive advantage.

 

Time-Travel Audits: A Key to Success for Change

Daniel Burrus, Founder & CEO of Burrus Research and Consulting, Article “Time-Travel Audits: A Key to Success for Change” August 11, 2014. Source: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140811125431-48342529-time-travel-audits-a-key-to-success-now-and-in-the-future. Adapted the following;

“Daniel Burrus has very intelligently painted the real-world picture, where past, present, and future eras may be witnessed. The scenario in general very much relates to project management in terms of its adaptation and applications by organizations for advancement in business.

Did you know that time travel was possible? It really is. For example, you can visit remote parts of the Amazon and meet people who are living just as they did a thousand years ago. They still use blow guns and spears as their tools. If you ask them if they’ve heard about “the internet,” they’ll show you their fishing net.

If a thousand years is too far back, you can go to China or Amish towns in Ohio and Pennsylvania and meet people who are living just as they did a hundred years ago. They get their water by the bucketful from a well, use oil lanterns for light, and utilize a horse and buggy as their main transportation.

But time travel doesn’t just happen in cultures around the world; it also occurs in business. You can go into some organizations today and time travel backwards just as easily. These companies use old technologies and techniques, and their employees are clinging to the past. Their legacy systems lead to legacy thinking. And even though they’re alive and well in the past, they’re increasingly having difficulty surviving in the present.

You can also go from one division of a company to another and time travel. For example, engineering may be equipped with the latest technologies, yet many HR functions continue to be buried under paper files and longhand forms. In that same way, you can go from person to person and be time traveling. That’s because some people are past-oriented. To them, the only place that was good is in the past, so they cling to that. The future seems to be far less in every way, and far more foreboding than the past.

Fortunately, just as we can time travel to the past, we can also travel to the future. In fact, some people in organizations are already there. They’re the ones who buy the latest gizmos with their own money because they want to have them; they experiment with new technology and are successful with it. They’re thinking and talking about the future, and they’re excited about it.

Likewise, some companies are future-oriented compared to others in their industry. For example, some magazines went digital from day one and never printed a paper copy. Some organizations were early adopters of social media even though the majority of businesses scoffed at it. And some businesses are so focused on the future that they roll out products and services consumers didn’t even know they wanted, yet they find them indispensable once they have them. Two prime examples are the iPhone and iPad.

When you’re ready to lead your organization into the future, consider these three points:

 

1.Do a time-travel audit of yourself and your colleagues. Where in time do you and your colleagues exist? Are you (or are they) future-oriented, present-oriented, or past-oriented? How is everyone’s outlook serving the company? While you can look at the past and learn from it, you should never be held back by it.

Your windshield is larger than your rearview mirror for a reason. To drive safely, you need to keep your eyes focused on the big picture in front of you and only occasionally look behind you. Since you’re going to be spending the rest of your life in the future, you might as well focus on it now. With today’s rapid pace of technological change and transformation, it’s more important than ever to keep your eyes on the windshield rather than the rearview mirror.

2.Turn past thinkers into a valuable asset. Some people in your organization may be past-oriented and dread the future, yet their good values, knowledge, experience, and wisdom may be captured.

There are two things to be done with past thinkers. Evaluate the best; first, choose to let them go, and lose the good things they have to offer. The second option (and the better one usually) is to turn them into a future-focused asset. How? Give them a job that fits their personality. Ask them, “Based on all of the things that have ever been done, what in your opinion is vital to keep us moving forward? Organization can’t keep everything, so what should be eliminated and what should be kept in order to thrive in this new era?”

      This approach forces them to come in line with what’s needed to go forward and keep the brand relevant. At the same time, it forces them to decide what needs to be eliminated. Essentially, it begins to position them strategically based on what they like doing and compels them to start thinking about the core capabilities that got the organization to where it is today; it also takes them from being a past-thinker to being a future-thinker. It’s a way of migration into the future.

3.Relate to others at their point in time. Just as you do an audit on time travel on yourself and your team-members, also include the people you interact with. For example, doing a time travel audit on your customers is very important. If you have a new product or service that is future-oriented, yet you’re talking to someone who is past-oriented, and if you start by talking to them with your future perspective, their eyes will gloss over and they’ll tune you out. You can’t go into the past and yank people into the future.

A better approach is to go into the past and walk with them into the future. In other words, relate to their position in the past and acknowledge that they are comforted by where they are, the technologies they use, and the principles they’re working under. Help them to look at the certainties, those hard trends that are the undeniable truths about the future, and then slowly walk them into the future so they can see that the future isn’t really foreboding.

 

In fact, the future can be filled with excitement and new opportunities that are even better than the old. As you do this, be careful not to place blame. This isn’t a matter of “setting them straight.” It’s about helping them see that the world has changed and the organization needs to change with it in order to thrive—and so does their knowledge and experience, coupled with an open mind.

 

The Future

Years ago, you could have a past or present mind-set and do quite well, because the pace of change was relatively slow. Today, technology is enabling a massive transformation in how you sell, market, communicate, collaborate, innovate, train, and educate. Therefore, as a leader, you need to help migrate your people and your company to a future view. Remember, one cannot head back to the past; the only option is to move into the future. Help everyone to see that future, embrace it, and thrive in it. That’s the surest path to long-term success”.

DANIEL BURRUS is considered one of the world’s leading technology forecasters and innovation experts and is the founder and CEO of Burrus Research, a research and consulting firm that monitors global advancements in technology-driven trends to help clients understand how technological, social, and business forces are converging to create enormous untapped opportunities. He is the author of six books, including The New York Times best seller Flash Foresight.

An organization needs to be assessed to establish gaps in its present position and the position desired with enhanced competence.

 

Carry Out Assessments

You need to start with assessments of an organization for readiness to change. The processes outlined in Figure 3.4 are helpful for carrying out such an assessment.

 

Figure 3.4 An approach for assessment

 

Organizational Change Readiness

It is recommended that objectives be developed along with a picture of the desired level of competence of an organization after transformation. This paves the way for necessary change implementation within the organization.

 

Effecting Organizational Transformation

Fundamental changes are needed for organizations in order to both adapt to the new business environment and become ecologically sustainable. This double challenge is urgent and real, and the extensive organizational change is fully justified.

However, keep in view the overall track record, which is very poor. Recent surveys have reported again and again that the efforts at organizational change have not yielded the promised results. Instead of managing new organizations, CEOs ended up managing the unwanted side effects of the efforts.

A look at the natural environment reveals the paradox of continuous change, adaptation, and creativity; and yet business organizations seem to be incapable of dealing with change. The roots of the paradox lie in the dual nature of human organizations: on the one hand, they are social institutions designed for specific purposes, such as making money for their shareholders, managing the distribution of political power, transmitting knowledge, or spreading religious faith, but on the other hand, organizations are communities of people interacting with one another to build relationships, help each other, and make their daily activities meaningful on a personal level.

There is evidence and there are examples of duality—the purposeful and relational natures of organizations. The controlling members need to make sense of the organization they have and the organization to which they aspire.

The question remains, how do the constituent members of an organization effect transformation from “what they have” to “what they desire”?

It is common to hear that people in organizations resist change. In reality, people do not resist change; they resist having change imposed on them. Their natural change processes are very different from the organizational changes designed by “reengineering” experts and mandated from the top.

Understand the gap between where you want to be and where you are at present.

 

Gap Analysis

The planning process requires establishing the gaps, and this may be carried out as shown in the following table:

 

Figure 3.5 Approach for organizational assessment for establishing GAP

 

Mind the GAP

The gaps are then mapped out in line with the approach highlighted in Figure 3.6.

 

Figure 3.6 Transformation for high-performing culture

The gaps established in comparison with the noted model for advancement in a desired direction need to be dealt with accordingly for competence building.

An endeavor for transformation in an organization is seldom free from encounters of inhibitors that need effective management at both the individual and organizational levels.

 

Manage the Inhibitors and Enhance Enablers

You need to overcome the inhibitors and enhance enablers to effect an improvement at an organizational level, shown in Figure 3.7, and at an individual level, shown in Figure 3.8.

 

Figure 3.7 Management at organizational level

 

Figure 3.8 Management at individual level

 

Summary

The importance of the need for organizational culture to be managed and built to sustain high performance has been recognized. The Project Management approach and practices breed knowledge-based cultures such as project management practicing culture, leadership practicing culture, change management practicing culture, and organizational learning practice culture that together help develop a high-performing organizational culture.

Creativity and innovation are an integral part of project management, where the systems support continuous improvement in advancement for strategic implementation.

Bringing change in an organization is highly challenging and needs to be carried out in a most calculated way so as to help the organization sustain the change. Carrying out organizational time travel is a useful exercise as you may not be able to move the entire organization in one go. Common sense should prevail in that the areas that are most important for strategic advancement should be chosen first. There will always be some people and some departments staying behind. A methodology is provided, according to which it must be started with a careful assessment of the gaps: what is the present position and where does it need to move?

Restructuring of an organization may be a better solution to develop and make it culturally strong to move in a strategic direction and effectively serve the needs and expectations of stakeholders. Change is imperative in the changing work environment. It has also been recommended by Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM)

 

Referencess

Brown and Duguid (1991) Organizational Learning

Components of Creativity: Source: T.M. Amabile, HBR Oct, 98.

Daniel Burrus, Founder & CEO of Burrus Research and Consulting, Article “Time-Travel Audits: A Key to Success for Change”, August 11, 2014. Source: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140811125431-48342529-time-travel-audits-a-key-to-success-now-and-in-the-future Research by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM).“Managing Organizational Change: A guide for Human Resource Professionals in the era of change. Source: https://spea.indiana.edu/doc/undergraduate/theses/ugrd-thesis2016-mgmt-repischak.pdf