In the words of Mello (2010), 'corporate culture is the pattern of shared values and norms which help individuals understand how to behave in an organization', while according to Tabuena (2013), "corporate culture is defined by academics as the values, vision, norms, working language, symbols, systems, habits and beliefs of an organization.
For an international company like ours, "Total Upstream Companies in Nigeria" (TUCN), the corporate culture is affected by the diversity in cultures over different geographical zones, thereby giving a varying perception of requirements. TUCN in order to accommodate these diversities and enhance a corporate culture that is grounded on their values, communicate changes as well as carry out various forms of trainings to ensure that all employees imbibe this culture.
My organization, TUCN has several aspects to its approach of projects; Corporate Social Responsibility, Ethics and Safety are the main focus of the company which places sustainable development as the center of its strategy.In TUCN, the corporate culture is a reflection of the company's business strategy.
TUCN's operations are project based and as a result portfolios are setup to better manage the available resources as well as set priorities due to the competing interests. Based on these, the principle of corporate culture which had already been in place in TUCN is better encouraged to foster improvements in the extent to which sustainable development is entrenched in all projects of the company.
THE MCELROY TRANSLATION COMPANY: CASE
As described by Tina Cargile in Kerzner (2010), certain cultures existed in McElroy Translation Company that portended hindrances when they sought to adopt project management. These cultures were inherent with the operations of McElroy and had been accepted due to the successes of their projects.
In attempting to implement project management, McElroy encountered barriers as a result of certain cultural challenges, which includes;
- Information dissemination; a situation where communication across the stakeholders was not encouraged.
- Outdated procedures that was no longer in sync with the current trend.
- Project Scope and turnaround defined without involvement of project team.
- Independent operations of individual departments: cooperation among teams was lacking.
- Arbitrary deadlines which negates the concept of timely delivery of projects.
McElroy's senior leadership recognized the problem and solicited contributions from various levels of management and the employees, evaluated the inputs and determined that information dissemination and communication across the company needed to be improved in order to get project management adopted by the organization.
As a result of the evaluation, the following steps were implemented to enhance project management within the company;
- Development of Proprietary software to aid in real-time tracking of project activity by all employees, an investment decision taken by management was considered as the most important change.
- Information availability and dissemination via electronic form on the shared network, thereby making all project materials, such as communications with clients, assumptions during planning etc, accessible to all employees.
- Redundancy was eliminated by merging autonomous department network filing and folder structure into a single structure.
- Involvement of project managers from early stage of estimation, engaged to solve problems directly with clients, with technical inputs from line employee on request and ensuring that the internal processes as well as challenges were clearly understood by the sales team for use in their project discussions with clients.
- Short duration daily meetings for daily and weekly review of project status was introduced to replace selected team meetings that were lengthy, this provided an avenue for various representatives of all departments to contribute, ask question and participate in problem solving. This made it possible to identify solvable problems regularly.
- Establishment of open-door policy by project managers, decisions and assumptions were freely communicated with the team and their feedbacks were included in the current and perhaps future project plans.
- Prioritization of projects was carried out using a simple coding system with deadlines set to effectively cater for the client's needs and project scope.
- Client issues were addressed by a dedicated customer service department which was formed to handle post-delivery problems.
- Information flow and channels of communication was better enhanced with development of electronic shipping procedures together with dedicated electronic reporting system.