EDITOR’S PREFACE
Project management is the bridge between what an organization is and what it needs to become. Organizations continually grapple with how to face the economic, financial, and political challenges that assail their markets, corporate missions, and operational methods. In response to these challenges, project managers are daily tasked with work that enables organizations to build new capabilities in the midst of chaotic conditions and to create the outcomes needed for the future.
The project management bridge is straining under the weight of the mandate for change. Why is it almost buckling? After all, the bridge was built wisely:
It was built based on historical project management practices for how to get work done.
It was reinforced with domain-specific wisdom—quality approaches or product development methodologies.
It has large girder beams that connect it to a stable foundation: project portfolio management.
Yet while this bridge still can carry traffic, it can’t support the emerging requirements of the current storm. According to James Conner, director of engineering and technology, UC Berkeley Extension, “Using classical project management, you can successfully fabricate a bridge. But your competitor’s strategic use of organization-based project management will create a global powerhouse respected by all.”
The terms organizational project management and strategy are seldom used in the same sentence. Organizational project management aims to change that. A focus on organizational project management helps organizations coordinate the interfaces between:
Project management
Program management
Portfolio management.
It is also intended to help close the gap between project work and operations or the customer.
Doing the right projects and doing the project work right can provide the competitive advantage that enables an organization to become a global powerhouse. This is why a group of project management thought leaders got together to write this book. We work in organizations around the world, and we want to rethink how to make project work count—how to ensure that it delivers business results and outcomes. Cumulatively, we have a couple of hundred years of industry experience, and our expertise spans almost every industry and crosses several continents. The passion that links us is our desire to share trends, thoughts, and case studies about how project management is changing from a standalone domain to an end-to-end business footprint.
We wrote this book for those individuals who fund projects, direct projects, or conduct project work. Readers of this book may be called project sponsors, business leaders, operations managers, executive leaders, senior project managers, program managers, portfolio managers, or project management office (PMO) staff. Regardless of their title, all of these individuals are on the front line of project work, daily facing questions such as: “What must be done to improve business outcomes?” “How do we better align ourselves with corporate strategy?” “Which work is the biggest priority?” “How do we organize the work?”
This book was written to offer answers to these questions. The insights our contributors offer are crucial to senior project managers in their role as front-line liaisons with customers, operations, project sponsors, and senior leadership. The book is organized into four parts:
Part I. What Is Organizational Project Management? Organizational project management (OPM) is an emerging trend that is intended to move project managers away from focusing on project management methods and toward focusing on the outcomes needed by the users of our business solutions. This part provides foundational knowledge to understand organizational project management methods.
Part II. Strategic Project Management Concepts. A key concept underlying OPM is alignment between project work and strategy. Several contributors provide practical guidance on how to overcome challenges in organizational alignment and discuss proven business-leader actions that lead to project success.
Part III. Insights for Accelerated Project Execution. Organizational project management is closely linked to organizational maturity. Several contributors offer advice on how high-performance organizations can respond to environmental factors with transformation projects, conduct assessments, and become sensitive to cultural differences when performing project work across time zones and cultures.
Part IV. Closing Thoughts for Leaders. Project work is not done in isolation; it is part of a business system. The final chapters address all the components that must work together to produce effective business outcomes, not just project outcomes.
Before we dive into the substance of OPM, let’s consider some mental adjustments that must be made.
Mistaken Guiding Principles
It might be said that project management is simply common sense on steroids. Or, as contributing author Michael O’Brochta notes, “Project management is about applying common sense with uncommon discipline.” When I share this statement with clients across the United States, I usually get some guilty laughs. Throughout this book we highlight mistaken concepts about project management that both hinder our profession and cause us to act unwisely. Therefore, in this book, key project management leaders speak to four project management myths in an effort to move the profession forward.
Myth 1: Project Management Is about Project Managers
The project management profession has undergone significant positive change. It has fixed itself up. The role of the project manager has become far more professional; global standards have been created; certifications can be gained; and assessments are used to measure project management maturity.
After this self-improvement push, project managers were eager to be recognized as valuable contributors to the fabric and structure of viable organizations. They were ready for the proverbial prom. They had new dresses and new tuxedos—but in 2001, the limo company called many project managers to tell them that the global recession meant they no longer had a ride to the ball. Many project managers lost their jobs. Management simply could not afford the overhead costs of that administrative role.
Mental Model Adjustment
Why did project managers experience such a large wave of layoffs? It may be that they have been too focused on processes and not on improving organizational outcomes. They talk about scope, cost, and schedule without considering how the project will deliver strategic value. Project managers can get excited about the tools and techniques and lose sight of the goal to deliver desired organizational improvements. Project managers may be too focused on the art of project management at the expense of desired user outcomes. Figure P-1 shows what the traditional PM focus may have looked like.
Yes, project managers care about users. They gather users’ requirements, then ask them to sign off on the project at the end. But do project managers stay awake at night thinking about how to improve business operations or how to deal with challenging scheduling, planning, and managing issues? No; these issues are sometimes considered up front and during deployment, but then project managers get busy with project management work in the middle of the life cycle.
Figure P-1 Traditional Project Management Focus
According to Joseph Sopko, a software and engineering department senior consultant at Siemens Corporate Research, Inc.,
Project management best practice standards are fairly mature, yet research studies consistently reveal that most organizations fail to realize the benefits that projects were meant to deliver. Why should OPM maturity improvement projects be any different? OPM improvement initiatives are business change programs. If you do not manage benefits, then you will not consistently deliver benefits.
Not everything is best run as a project. What we find is that you can run a project like a program and succeed. However, if you run a program like a project, it’s very likely that you will not achieve the benefits intended or be able to sustain them.
What to Read in This Book
How can project managers change? In Chapter 1, Russ McDowell proposes a remedy for our industry. He suggests that we invert our perspective. Figure P-2 shows that we need to keep our eye on delivering benefits to ensure that project management maximizes its impact. McDowell provides a foundation for understanding the meaning and value of organizational project management in changing organizational outcomes. If the focus is first on those we serve, project management will deliver the correct outcomes.
Jim Sloane presents an overview in Chapter 2 of how project managers can shift from simple task execution to strategic focus. Raju Rao, in Chapter 3, presents industry methodologies that can create a stronger linkage between project work and corporate strategic vision.
Figure P-2 New Project Management Focus
Myth 2: Project Management Is about Skill Development
Much of the project manager’s role can be described by the breadth of project management methodologies, templates, policies, and procedures that govern projectized work. The load of acronyms used in our profession is enough to weary any new (and previously eager) recruit.
Mental Model Adjustment
It is easy to study a project template, learn how to implement it, and increase one’s PM skill proficiency. But the future of project management needs more than skill proficiency, it requires leadership. So what is kind of role belongs to the project manager? Is it an influencing role, or a communication and leadership role aimed at delivering organizational improvements? Project managers must be leaders. Project management skills can be taught; leadership can only be inspired.
What to Read in This Book
How can project managers become better leaders? In Chapter 4, Michael O’Brochta challenges business leaders to consider that business success is dependent on project success. According to O’Brochta, the good news is that business leaders can take proven actions that will raise the odds of project success. Randall Englund follows up in Chapter 5 with a discussion of the role of the project sponsor. He suggests ways to change the project environment culture dramatically by improving leadership and the relationship between senior management and project managers.
Myth 3: You Must Improve Project Maturity
Improving project practices is an excellent tactic, but it is narrowly focused on project maturity. There are many global standards regarding how to assess project, product, and initiative maturity, and we are grateful for their contributions—but their usefulness can be limited.
Let’s go back to the bridge metaphor. To ensure quality, we can, for example, inspect the nuts and bolts that we installed when we built the bridge. But what happens if the bridge is of high quality but isn’t in the correct location? We have wasted organizational assessment resources that could be better used on bridges that do connect critical areas. Assessments often focus on models; organizational project management focuses on linking strategy with project outcome to obtain better business results.
Mental Model Adjustment
Chaotic times dictate a change in focus from project maturity to OPM maturity. We need to view the project environment in terms of linkages to:
Operations
Strategy
Organizational design.
Project managers must be project leaders—business-savvy project professionals who help organizations build the right set of products, services, and results that matter to those we serve.
What to Read in This Book
In Chapter 6, Folake Dosunmu blows the doors off stale thinking with a perspective on project management’s role in organizations’ transformation efforts. She takes us way beyond the project paradigm of competing demands of cost, time, and scope to understanding how organizations move incrementally through traditional project work to transformative projects that fundamentally change an organization.
Abdur Rafay Badar understands the interactions between organizational culture and strategic alignment. In Chapter 7, he explains how cultural awareness can help companies succeed in project work and even transform themselves. In Chapter 8, Sara Núñez explores the value of performing project environment assessments that deliver organizational improvement. Pavan Kumar Gorakavi analyzes the turnaround of a large public-sector organization in Chapter 9, answering the question of whether OPM concepts can be used in public-service organizations with a resounding yes.
Myth 4: Project Management Is Successful Project Work
Project managers often are considered overhead. Along with thousands of others, I lost my Silicon Valley start-up job in the dot-com crash. The planning, managing, and measuring tasks I performed were delegated instead to the technical team, which was thought to be “really” doing the work.
Why was the work given to the technical team instead of project managers? This is a complex issue, but in part it was due to an industry-wide myopic preoccupation with the profession of project management. Project managers inaccurately believe that the strategic value of coordinating schedules, budgets, and scope is obvious, so they don’t emphasize the strategic value and organizational benefits that result from a well-managed project. As a result, project managers present themselves merely as paperwork administrators, and bureaucrats are often cut during recessions.
I consistently hear the following from many of the hundreds of project managers whom I work with around the globe: “All I need to do to be successful is to complete the project work on time, on budget, and within the scope originally defined.” This is generally a correct statement; successfully executing a project is the foundation of project management. Unfortunately, many project management professionals have made it the ceiling of their thinking and not the floor from which to build. Organizational project management is much bigger than simply successfully managing project work.
Mental Model Adjustment
OPM is about supporting a business system and its goals. To that end, project managers and top management need to engage in effective communication. Bas de Baar of ProjectShrink.com writes,
Senior management turns to project management to get things done. Project managers are the Getting-Things-Done-Squad! They drive changes through the thickets and swamps of corporate and global politics, often at dangerously high speeds with zero visibility. There is no time for compliance-for-compliance-sake, review-upon-review, or no-you-cannot-change project management. Any organization performing work project needs leadership and awesome communication.
What to Read in This Book
Marcia Daszko wraps up this book in Chapter 10 by conclusively stating that project management must be part of a larger business system—a system that aligns both strategy and how an organization gets work done. She leaves us with next steps for improving organizational outcomes.
These key voices in Organizational Project Management welcome you into critical conversations about aligning strategy and project work.