Think of an organisation you have been a part of, either your current organisation or a previous one. Examine and describe the aspects of that organisation's corporate culture which would support project portfolio management and take on the challenges involved in getting those aspects embraced by the organisation..
1.The organization i currently work for,, acting in the Oil & Gas industry, has a strong corporate culture in place. It takes time to develop that, moreover when you consider the merges and acquisitions along the way. Strong processes and procedures are in place, but the constant control it has to deal with, relates to integrating the teams and structures newly acquired. Along with mergers or acquisitions, of course that the best practices, technologies and people from the other organizations, have to be first identified, further on preserved and integrated into mo re complete and complex processes and procedures.
The integration is not an overnight task, it takes buy-in from the teams to be integrated, and a cultural change for them to relate to processes/ procedures changes they are requested to align to.
Being an organization divided into various business lines (19) , it is easy for communication flows to be disrupted, information not centralized or made available in only certain departments. Project management concepts exist, but only in 3 dedicated business lines: Business Consulting; Technical Consulting Services and Integrated Project Management.
The concept of an integrated offering provided to the customer, by combining all services under one umbrella, , is a long time living one, which is approached in various ways. Still it goes as far as for the high visibility/ high risk / high value projects. If i was to rate the organization's maturity level, it would be probably 2, but with great ongoing efforts for reaching level 3.
The focus on the Project management competency is more visible in the last 2 to 3 years, where there are more visible investments in the Technical Consulting Services business line, to have trained experts and through the institution of the Consulting Hubs. Lean 6 Sigma techniques are also more and more embraced , coming from the urge of continuous improvement.
Still, these initiatives are not consistent across the board in all locations and all business lines. It has also to do with the size of the organization, coming back to the number of acquisitions, but it also comes down to the management support of this cultural change that has to occur.
The leadership , their top down message flow, needs more strength and consistency.
The communication means could be made available. On an IT standpoint, it would take a project of centralizing all the systems and various applications used by each business line to monitor the performance of their operations, and making the data available across the board in a centralized repository. On the upside, the infrastructure is there...it only takes alignment, and finding that one application that could be best customized to best serve the unanimous needs.
As for the culture, the SMART ,yet ambitious and motivating objectives , is there. The open door, open minded approach from the managers is also highly present and motivating for the staff. This is probably what i see as the one big advantage for smoothing the implementation of a corporate project and portfolio management driven activity.
What i see as the way of communicating this need for change management, is that the future growth needed to match the market ever changing demand, has to happen also organically, and not only through acquisitions. Being a highly focused technology organization, it always aims at developing the best in class, cutting edge techniques, which represents another area where the project management focus could add value, by helping improve the technology commercialization cycle, and connecting those to operational needs.
2.Review the McElroy Translation Company case in Kerzner, Chapter 6, pp. 293-296 and analyse the cultural challenges that presented barriers to adopting project management, and the steps that the senior leadership of this firm had to take to get project management embraced by the organisation
For the McElroy case, the need for the move from a corporate culture to a project management driven one, arose when applying the company's processes and procedures became clearly disfunctional and customer needs were no longer served at their best. At the same time the market was evolving and demand was continuously increasing, in areas where the company was clearly struggling to cope with the volume of work. The challenge was then analyzed and noted to be at two levels:
- first, the increasing demand in volume and complexity
- second, the tighter deadlines requested by the customers.
At the s ams time, the communication between departments was not visible, redundant information getting stuck at various levels. Ultimately deliverables were issued to the customer, outside of their needs. There was little orientation around customer needs, and more coping with the customer requests.
The ultimate conclusion was that, in order to cope with the competition on the market, and sustain a leading position, the organization and to deliver to the customer not only a product, but an integrated solution.
There were 9 steps taken towards achieving a project oriented organization, as the shift had to be achieved as rapid as possible:
1. Professional software solution- investment in a software that would enable the monitoring of all projects and the resource needs.
2. Knowledge sharing- all materials related to projects were centralized in a database on the internal network. All parties involved in the project delivery were aware at any point in time of the status and information available: customer needs, supplier availabilities etc
3. Single filing structure, opposed to independent filing from each departments
4. Advisory role- project managers roles were taken to the next level. A more active engagement with the customer, giving real time expert solutions to customer needs. Questions were now geared towards what is the deliverable used for by the customer, to understand how to reach the customer needs, rather than the customer wants.
5. Communication means- informative daily meetings, that would bring together all line managers involved, and would cut down from the endless chains of mails
6. Open door policy- active engagement from all the staff into the decisions and assumptions taken throughout the life of the project
7. SMART deadlines-commonly agreed to sustain both customer needs and internal workload possibilities
8. Dedicated customer service- to address customer issues and disseminate information
9. Communication flow-at all levels of the organization