Finding The Right Question

What Is the Relationship Between Project Success and Organizational Culture?

Understanding that dynamic could lead to a different approach to assessing project risk and managing project success.

First an underlying premise: culture is what people experience when they observe the behavior of their leaders.

If so, the question for Project Managers therefore is not only what culture does it take for their project to succeed, but more pointedly, what role does the Project Manager play in shifting organizational behaviors toward cultures that support project success.

Much has been written about agile projects and agile organizations, and the intersection of culture and project management. In many cases there is a vicious circle: organizations that are trying to become more agile need projects that are executed using agile principles which need organizations to support agile behavior and thinking, but the organizational culture is not yet so aligned.

This relationship between organizational culture and project success, however, transcends the methodology being applied. Culture is a driving factor for project success or failure, whether the approach is based on agile, traditional waterfall, or any other “in vogue” method. Perhaps it is time to reflect not on project management “best practices,” but on project management “best supporting cultures.”

There is a framework for assessing project risk and for managing to project success that is well proven, and is independent of project methodology. It is called The Seven Keys To Success. It was developed as a result of the merger of Price Waterhouse and Coopers & Lybrand project management experiences, and has been adopted by IBM, not just in its Global Business Services unit, but by the company-wide PM Center of Excellence.  It has been effectively used to understand “root cause” problems for failures as well as best practices to achieve success, in all manner of projects, all over the world, spanning the last twenty years.

Here is a quick summary:

Success Factor	Biggest Risk	Best Practice
Stakeholders are committed	Inadequate/ineffective project governance	Steering committee actively led by the executive most directly responsible for the business benefits
Business benefits will be realized	Poorly communicated business case	All critical project decisions made in support of realizing the business case
Work and schedule are predictable	No meaningful plan or progress reporting	Schedule and budget tied to critical and measurable milestones
Scope is realistic and managed	First-of-a-kind or “moon shot” ambition	Active issues management process involving project governance
Technical risks are mitigated	“Big bang” approach to implementation	Thorough and appropriate testing at all stages
Team is high performing	Inexperienced staff and low team morale	Team of diverse experiences in which trust levels are high
Delivery organization benefits will be realized	IT organization and/or contractors are viewed as “vendors”	IT organization and/or contractors are treated as business partners

 

Now think about that framework in terms of organizational cultures or behaviors that either threaten or actively support project success. Here is a partial list of cultural aspects that can either negatively affect or actively support a healthy outcome in terms of the framework of the Seven Keys To Success:

Success Factor	Negative Culture Indicators	Positive Culture and Behaviors
Stakeholders are committed	Stovepipe mentality	Effective cross-functional and cross-geography collaboration
Business benefits will be realized	Competitive complacency	C-suite focused on growth and marketplace success
Work and schedule are predictable	“We love fire drills”	Management time devoted to planning and re-planning
Scope is realistic and managed	“Shoot the messenger”	Governance processes that reward early recognition of changes to plan
Technical risks are mitigated	Hero mentality	“Don’t gamble unless we can afford to lose” mentality
Team is high performing	Lack of trust	Project staff are inspired by their management
Delivery organization benefits will be realized	“Who cares, as long as they stay within budget”	“We, the business owners, need them to succeed too”

 

Given the above, the question is not only what culture does it take to support project success, but what role does the Project Manager play in shifting organizational behaviors toward supportive cultures.

Expert level project managers lead with vision, develop trusted advisor relationships, embrace difficult conversations, and create a high-performing team based on mutual trust. They are encouraging senior business leaders to lead and behave in supportive ways, and they are leading their own teams in ways that inspire high levels of trust and performance.

Expert project managers are effectively shifting organizational culture around them in directions that will support success.

In today’s world, the highest calling for Project Managers is to be agents of cultural change, not simply a leader of a successful project outcome.

Agile: Which comes first, the method or the culture?

There is a lot being written these days about agile projects and agile organizations, and it got me to thinking about the intersection of culture and project management.

Here’s the difficult circularity: organizations that are trying to become more agile need projects that are executed using agile principles which need organizations to support agile behavior and thinking which need…

Then it dawned on me that perhaps it was ever thus, and we were too lost in PM best practices to focus on the impact of organizational culture.

I have spent the better part of my career on deepening our understanding of methods and practices, determining “root cause” problems for failures, and best practices to avoid failures. But I never bothered to articulate “best cultures” to support project success, or cultural dimensions that doomed some projects to failure.

For example, here are some cultural aspects (and you or I could list many more) that can negatively affect a healthy outcome in terms of the framework of the Seven Keys To Success:

Success Key	Negative Culture Indicators
Stakeholders Are Committed	Stovepipe mentality
Business Benefits Will Be Realized	Competitive complacency
Work And Schedule Are Predicted	We love fire drills
Scope Is Realistic And Managed	Shoot the messenger
Team Is High Performing	Lack of trust
Technical Risks Are Mitigated	Hero mentality
Delivery Organization Benefits Will Be Realized	IT organizations and contractors are suppliers, not partners

My perspective on culture is influenced by the notion that culture is what people feel when they observe the behavior of their leaders. So my question now is not what culture does it take, but what role does the Project Manager play in shifting organizational behaviors toward supportive cultures.

“Wait, that goes way above my pay grade,” you say? Well, if the Project Manager is not ready to stand before a Steering Committee and tell them what they need to hear, not simply what they want to hear, then he or she is in the wrong profession. Expert level project managers lead with vision, develop trusted advisor relationships, embrace difficult conversations, and create a high-performing team based on mutual trust. They are effectively shifting organizational culture around them in directions that will support success.

I have always felt that Project Managers are in the business of managing change.

With respect to agile organizations and agile project methods, I now believe that the highest calling for Project Managers is to be agents of cultural change.

Are C-level executives ready to ask that of their Project Managers? Are Project Managers willing to take that mission on?

The answer is “yes” in organizations that are becoming more agile.

Where Is Your Professional Sweet Spot?

Consider three dimensions of work: what you know a lot about (the source of your wisdom), what you love to do (the source of your passion, or “psychic compensation”), and how you want to engage and be engaged (your “terms and conditions” for working. Your sweet spot is defined by where they overlap.

Now create those three lists for yourself. Here’s mine:

• Wisdom
  • Growing and sustaining profitable professional services businesses
  • Designing and delivering professional development programs
  • Understanding what it takes to be an expert project or programme manager
  • Knowing what best practices are critical to non-profit Boards
• Passion
  • Being a change agent
  • Being a coach/facilitator/provocateur
  • Collaborating with trusted and respected colleagues
  • Stretching and learning, for myself and with others
• Terms
  • Independence
  • Part-time, or full-time for a limited duration
  • Only traveling internationally if in business class
  • Having fun.

Now think about when in your professional life those three areas overlapped, because that is your sweet spot.

In my case, two stand out:

• designing and delivering professional development programs for professionals on an executive track, and
• working with – or on – non-profit Boards in Baltimore.

So where is your sweet spot? What were you doing when you were in your sweet spot? Where will you go for your next sweet spot adventure?  What will you do to make it happen?

What separates “expert” project/programme managers from the rest?

The Dreyfus scale of expertise, from Level One to Level Five, is well established scientifically and is widely used. Lia DiBello, CEO of WTRI, and a published cognitive scientist, has studied the phenomenon of expertise as it manifests in project managers, through interviews and behavioral studies in a wide range of practitioners. She has clearly demonstrated that the key distinguishing behaviors with Level Five accomplished veterans is that they manage stakeholders well, and they know who the “real” stakeholder is. They manage projects in such a way as to provide the hoped for business benefits, even if the project plan, strictly executed, would not do that.  They know when to make changes and have the ability to sell the changes to stakeholders.  When difficulties arise – even major ones – they are able to look at these events as opportunities for greater results rather than as insurmountable problems or risks to be avoided.

Relationship management, leadership, and a laser focus on business benefits – these are the competencies that separate the best from the rest.

And this comes as no surprise, against the backdrop of the Seven Keys To Success. The most critical dimensions relate to Stakeholder Commitment, Business Benefit Realization, and creating a High Performing Team.

Here’s the rub, though. Most PM training focuses on planning, tracking, and containing scope.

Appropriate behaviors for Level 3 PM expertise. Unfortunately, somewhere between irrelevant and counter-intuitive to Level 5 performance.

So the question is: what are companies doing to develop the most important competencies in those who lead their most important projects and programmes?

Perhaps the answer sheds a different light on why we still can’t seem to get beyond a failure rate of 60-70% of projects.

Where In the Internet Did My Domain Name Go?

Nineteen days after my web site disappeared into a black hole, I have managed to escape the “event horizon”. Maybe this story will be helpful to some of you.

In 2013, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) published an updated Registrar Accreditation Agreement (RAA) that included an email verification requirement. Dotster, the service I use for registering my domain name, seems to only have implemented this in the last year.

Here’s the problem. I closed my old email account that I had registered with this domain. So no verification emails ever came through to me when it came time to renew the domain name. No worries, you say, just change the email address of record. Can do, online, no less. However, before that can take effect, Dotster is required to – you guessed it – verify the legitimacy of this by sending an email for verification.

I ultimately learned that if I sent a copy of my Driver’s License to a special Compliance Group at Dotster, I gained their blessing and my domain was again open to the world.

So if any of you were wondering why you couldn’t find www.tamarac-consulting.com - and no doubt losing significant amounts of sleep over the matter – you may now rest assured.

You’re welcome.

Will you speak truth to power?

Your boss just recommended the dumbest idea. Worse yet, the Senior Vice President - for whom you are slated to lead her key strategic initiative - just demanded an implementation schedule that is unrealistic. Your boss’s boss just asked you to fill a key role on your team with his inexperienced protégé.

There is enough power-related insanity in the bigger world these days. Now it seems to be invading your own working world.

Yikes! What to do?

Well, not to belabor the obvious, but you have two choices: acquiesce, or object.

Your first thought is to acquiesce, because not to do so would be a CLM (career limiting move).

But here’s my thought for your consideration. Sometimes, life gives you only two choices: make a potential career-changing decision now, or have an actual one made for you later.

One thing is certain. People who ask you to do the impossible don’t know as much – and aren’t as experienced – as you are in the specific domain under discussion. Furthermore, it is entirely likely that if they are pushed (e.g. you say the you can’t be successful, but perhaps they can find someone else who will), they will quickly re-evaluate and back off their demands.

On the other hand, they may not, and will punish you for insubordination. Now there’s an alternate universe that seems highly unattractive!

So when your gut tells you it is wrong, know that you have the hard-earned experience to be confident that you are right!

Do you want to make a choice now, or have one made for you later?

Simple choice, but not an easy decision. True for project managers, and now, apparently, true for citizens and elected officials.

What If You Could Accelerate “Time To Wisdom”?

What does it take to acquire deeper expertise in project management? To build wisdom beyond simply learning skills? Too often, this takes years of experience, often at significant cost to the enterprise when the wisdom gained by the individual comes at the expense of significant failure at the enterprise level.

One company – WTRI - has a proven approach to developing this expertise using virtual world technology, driven by an underlying engine that simulates complex business and real world events, and that is structured in accordance with principles from the field of cognitive science. The impact is to create a “safe-fail” environment wherein people can first un-learn the limitations of their current thinking and perspective and consequently try different approaches that measurably migrate them upward toward a level of “intuitive expert”. And all within a couple of months, not years, and with no real cost of failing, which is so cognitively necessary to this kind of learning.

How does this actually work?

WTRI has built its own proprietary virtual world, coupled to its proprietary event generator. The result is a virtual world as big as the world itself and one that embodies the dynamic economic models of the world and of companies. It can be as complex as it needs to be, without the typical constraint to online learning of highly scripted and overly simplified scenarios.  

The projects are located in companies that – while fictional – are fully fleshed out in terms of their finances, products, history and technologies. The companies are located in a world economy that – while fictional – is fully fleshed out with the issues facing global and multi-national companies today, such as integrating supply chains and managing regulatory constraints.

It is just this kind of complexity that separates “expert” project managers from the rest. The Dreyfus scale of expertise, from Level One to Level Five, is well established scientifically and is widely used. With respect to project managers, Level Five accomplished veterans manage stakeholders well, and they know who the “real” stakeholder is. They manage projects in such a way as to provide the hoped for business benefits, even if the project plan, strictly executed, would not do that.  They know when to make changes and have the ability to sell the changes to stakeholders.  When difficulties arise – even major ones – they are able to look at these events as opportunities for greater results rather than as insurmountable problems or risks to be avoided.

Each team of participant learners gets two attempts at the exercise, in accordance with the cognitive science precept that failure is very important to accelerating learning.   Participants who are not operating at the expert level will miss the big picture on the first try and will not achieve successful results. After a debrief, they are given a second chance, with some programmed additional challenges to the events within and outside the project.

In this second pass, by focusing on key relationships and ultimate business outcomes, they inevitably perform at a Dreyfus level which is measurably higher than where they began before the first pass, as assessed in three ways:

• The financial success or the business benefits delivered by the project; there were the expected business benefits, which were not easy to actualize given the complexity of the project, but which could also be exceeded if the project managers identified hidden opportunities
• The Seven Keys, a “project health” metric developed by PWC and IBM Global Business Services; both the team and the stakeholders rate the project multiple times on seven critical dimensions and discuss any discrepancies in their perspectives
• A set of 30 challenges that elicit “judgments” that measure the team’s Dreyfus level. 

In documented outcomes, some participants who began at Level Two reached Level Four on the Dreyfus scale on many of the challenges. To put this in context, Human Resource data shows that moving from a Level Two to a Level Four in performance would normally take from 10-15 years, depending on opportunities, leadership and types of experiences.  

There are many “distance learning” technologies and sponsoring companies, many of which are focused on project managers. None, however, have the measurable impact that WTRI achieves with its unique blend of virtual worlds, realistic and complex business simulation, and the application of the principles of cognitive science.

WTRI’s solution creates a significant shift - in expertise not merely skills, in months not years, without the cost of failure.

What is that worth?

What Can You Learn from the School of Virtual Knocks?

All the really good (read “expert”) project managers I know or have heard of have become so through years of experience, through which they have gained as much scar tissue as they have wisdom.

Must it always be so?  Perhaps not.

Here is a recent article about research that seems to demonstrate otherwise.

Admittedly, this article does not purport to create experts (Level 5 on the Dreyfus scale of expertise). 

But it does claim that it moved a number of participants from Novice or Advanced Beginner (Levels 1 and 2) to Intermediate or Competent (Levels 3 and 4).  This acquisition of expertise in real life can typically require 10 years or more, not to mention at what cost of any failures or errors committed along the way.

Interestingly, when I mentioned this to a group of highly experienced consultants and project managers, most of whom were in their 40’s and early 50’s, my “news” was met with extreme skepticism.  When I probed a bit deeper, the negative reaction stemmed from the perceived threat that their hard-won expertise might be discounted in the job market if younger people could come along so quickly and easily.

I imagine old-time airplane pilots scoffed at the first flight simulators too.  Yet professional training at the highest levels now requires their use.  Schools of Medicine and Nursing require training on simulated patients too, by the way.  

I wonder when project management organizations are going to catch up? I wonder how many untimely "crashes" and "deaths" might be saved?

What does it take to survive and thrive in today’s professional services organizations?

In terms of serving your masters, your client comes first. 

Right behind this obligation, though, is the pressure to serve your organization.  And senior management is very focused on signings, revenue, and profitability, as they should be, given their responsibility to shareholders and to the bottom line.

That focus is manifested through the systems that measure progress to targets, which often result in last-minute calls to action and significant amounts of your time away from your clients while receiving “help” from senior management. 

And that “help” is almost never helpful, because of two realities:

• With respect to both your sales and your delivery, the critical drivers of your success are not measurable by those management systems, and
• Those critical success factors cannot be put in place at the last minute, regardless of how much you or your senior management wish it were so.

How, then, can you survive and thrive in today’s challenging professional services environment?

The simple answer is to never need that kind of “help”. 

The less obvious answer is to act based on what you believe about your long-term investments that are necessary to drive your future short-term successes. 

What are the drivers of long-term success in signings, profit, talent development, and personal renewal?  What should you believe is important personal behavior, in spite of the urgent messages coming from “the system”?  What personal management system will you have to implement in order to sustain that behavior?

Figure that out, and you will not only survive, you will thrive in your chosen career.

 

How Will Big Data and Social Media Change the Nature of Project Management?

It has been perversely comforting over the last 30 years to see that success or failure in managing projects is still determined by the same issues.  Indeed, The Seven Keys To Success framework, when it was conceived 15 years ago, explained the fundamental basis for success or failure of every project in the previous 10 years of history of Coopers & Lybrand Consulting as well as Price Waterhouse Consulting.  It has been in wide-spread use continuously since then in PwC Consulting and now in IBM, and has helped many Project Managers successfully navigate challenging engagements.  And yet there also remain too many times that outcomes are not successful.  Inevitably, the reasons – and the missed opportunities that would have altered the course of history - are always understandable against that framework.

As I say, perversely comforting.

And yet there are some seismic tremors being felt in the world of technology-driven projects that have even this old dog thinking he may need to learn some new tricks.  I remain convinced that the Seven Keys will continue to be relevant.  What I am curious about is how these two phenomena – Big Data and Social Media for Business – might significantly change the landscape over which our projects are conceived and executed.

Let’s start with Big Data.  This isn’t just an enabling technology.  This is an opportunity to profoundly change businesses – including the business of government – by inventing new benefits arising from merging and analyzing multiple sources of input, some of which are static, but many of which are processed in real time or near-real time.  Current examples include smarter cities such as Rio de Janeiro.  Other examples can be found in smarter health care with personal monitors that send data in near-real time for pattern diagnostics and alerts to health care providers.  What impact would those kinds of projects have on our notion of methods, of business benefit realization, of the breadth of stakeholder landscapes, and of mitigating technical risks?

Now consider social media.  Beyond the Big Data aspects (e.g. mining Twitter and Google traffic for behavioral patterns), I am intrigued by the prospects that might arise from crowd-sourcing.  How might a project engage a much broader set of stakeholders to understand requirements or test user interfaces using social media?  How might a project team find and test technical solutions using social media?  Will this, in fact, become the next wave in the realm of knowledge management?  Who needs to capture knowledge artifacts in searchable databases if you can connect in real time to the right mind?

Whatever the future of projects and project management bring, I am pretty confident that it will be quite different from the typical project of today. 

I’m also pretty confident that five or ten years from now I will still find our collective track records of success perversely comforting.