Synaptus

I spent the last week at a Project Management Institute (PMI) standards meeting where I serve on the OPM3 second edition standards team. There was a very interesting conversation that took place over the weekend regarding whether PMI standards should be considered best practices. The answer in general is no. A standard is considered to be a generally accepted good practice. In an emerging discipline, it is likely that there are best practices not in general use yet - so they won’t be part of the standard. This introduces two interesting questions. Are standards worth pursuing and what role does PMI play in thought leadership around Project Management?

First, standards are good practices. If you aren’t up to the level of the standard yet and project management is important to you, you should be working to achieve the standard. Just like you can’t learn advanced financial analysis until you understand adding and subtracting, if you don’t understand or aren’t can’t achieve even the standard, you probably aren’t very good at project management. I just hope that your business isn’t dependent on being able to implement projects to achieve their strategic or operating goals. Most of the project management disasters I’ve been involved in have involved people trying to skip the basics to jump to an approach that involved implementing some new practice. The Organizational Project Management Maturity Model (OPM3) helps you figure out where you stand relative to these standards and helps you develop a roadmap so you can work on improving your ability to effectively perform projects. At the end of the day, a lot of PM is still blocking and tackling, you just can’t get past it.

Secondly, PMI has people on staff and thousands of active volunteers that probably spend to much of their time thinking about project management. There is a full time research staff looking into project management and exploring best practices. I believe I heard that there were 50 research papers published by PMI last year (2006). So, while the standard doesn’t reflect emerging best practices there are conferences and local chapters that explore and promote advanced thoughts about project management. As I just experienced this weekend, if you want to sit around and discuss the merits of emergins best practices in project management there isn’t a much better community than PMI.

At the workshop I am attending this weekend the concepts of lessons learned has come up several times. Several times someone in the group has said, "we have the lesson’s learned from the last time we did this, haven’t you reviewed this?" In each case the manager in charge of the project replied, "I didn’t know they were out there." Despite the diligent efforts to capture lessons learned, the organization isn’t benefiting from prior experiences as much as they could.

So when is a lesson learned considered learned? Stopping at the end of a project effort and identifying the things you wish you knew at the start of the project is a very powerful technique. Writing these lessons down for those coming after us is an important way to archive this information. But without a way to make sure that the people who will be responsible for the next project understand the relevant lessons learned, this is not productive time. There are three suggestions for handling this.

1. The people who are taking on projects must take the time to look for and review lessons learned from prior similar projects. This means that lessons learned must be stored where they can be found and tagged so that the relevant lessons can be identified.

2. There could be someone in your organization who is familiar with the lessons learned that are out there and provide some context to new managers.

3. Whenever possible, there should be a meeting with the new manager, a person with prior experience, and a someone who is familiar with the library of lessons learned where a conversation takes place. Even if 1 and 2 are taken care of, people learn much more from hearing stories than from reading a formal document.

Remember, documenting interesting lessons is valuable, but nothing is learned until it is available for someone to use it when it matters.

I am heading up to Philadephia today to meet with PMI’s Organizational Project Management Maturity Model (OPM3) update team. OPM3 is for organizations that recognize the need to improve the results they achieve from project management across the organization. The knowledge foundation identifies Portfolio Management, Program Management, Project Management, and Organizational Enabler best practices neccessary to align strategic goals to the successful completion of projects. Using the assessment tool, an organization can identify their level of maturity in these capabilities and develop a roadmap path to improving the maturity of these capabilities.

A recent poll in at allPM.com indicates over 65% of businesses intend to wait at least a year before performing this type of assessment. 30% don’t intend to perform an OPM3 assessment at all. Only 4% intend to start this within the next 6 months.

While this indicates an reasonably high level of interest in performing this Organizational Project Management assessment (70%), it leaves me wondering why the interest is so far out. Is it that the pain of performing project poorly isn’t high enough in these companies? Is it that the financial return of performing this type of assessment aren’t clear? Or is it that Project Management Organizations can’t get the executive support needed to perform an assessment like this?

The Organizational Project Management disciplines that ensure organizations are working on the right projects (Portfolio Management), coordinating the projects well (Program Management), and performing the projects effectively (Project Management) are critical to any company that is facing pressure to change their business for any reason. If the capabilities required to accomplish these are not subject to purposeful improvement, the organization will suffer in its attempts to achieve its strategic and operational goals.  Unless your organization is in the 10-20% of organizations that feel they perform project management successfully, it seems to me that now would be the time to start understanding how to improve the maturity of your important organizational project management capabilities.

Two very interesting sources for discussion on connecting strategy and execution. If you haven’t read Larry Bossidy’s book, Execution, you will find an interesting perspective on how to achieve this. Businessweek has executive summary available. He does a very good job of discussing the forces at work that makes executing strategy so important and so difficult today and provides a framework for getting there. Then, the key take away for me from the book, is the discussion of the three key processes of execution. He points out that many businesses treat their people, strategy, and operations processes as independent entities when in fact they are interdependent. Bossidy suggests it is the role of management to become intimately familiar with all three of these processes and to drive the alignment from the top.

The American Management Association’s Winter 2006-2007 Journal is all about the search for Strategic Alignment. In the article, How to get Strategic Alignment, they break the management challenges into Organizational Leadership, Operational Leadership, and People Leadership.

Both of these are worth the time to read through. Learning to align the interdependent aspects of strategy, process, and people in organizations driven by knowledge work and constant change is the top management challenge we face today. If you are still managing these in an ad-hoc or independent way, it is time to look for a systematic approach to achieving strategic alingment.

Tom Peters is an inspiring thought leader. A post on his blog today highlights how important it is for management to be able to align strategy and culture.

"A beautifully crafted strategy can fail when the employees in various divisions within an organization clash. Logically, we think that strategy should drive behavior, but, in reality, it’s the culture—underlying norms, values, belief systems—that dictates how effectively people work together. Employees’ behavior has direct impact on the bottom line, costs, revenue streams, level of productivity, customer satisfaction, even the brand—every aspect of the business is affected. If strategy and culture are not aligned, the culture may support behaviors that conflict with what has to get done—and actually block execution of the strategy."

I have worked in a Fortune 500 in the last year where the focus was on making sure everyone got along. Clearly there was some understanding that conflict wasted a tremendous amount of energy in businesses. Anything that lead to conflict was undiscussable. This made it impossible to point out where what someone was doing wasn’t helping get the job done. It also made change very difficult to implement. The behavior’s that were intended to reduce the conflict clearly blocked the execution of the strategy.

Notably, this is a ubiquitious problem that effects  almost every company we engage in. Most companies lack an effective way to connect strategy and culture in an actionable way. Developing and communicating strategy is itself a daunting task. Deliberately shaping culture can be overwhelming. If you agree that culture must be aligned with strategy, what are you doing to make it happen? Do you have a systematic way to make sure the culture and behaviors are creating results aligned with the strategy.

This will be the fourth blog I have launched. None of the others have met with much success. Primarily because I didn’t work on building the base. This week we will launch our new website (http://www.synaptus.com) and our new ezine (http://www.synaptus.com/SignUp.php).  This will become a forum for discussing ideas and reflecting on other blog postings that Synaptus consultants find interesting. The ezine will be for more complete coverage of issues and trends in the areas where Synaptus consults. Comments will be moderated, but I hope to get engaged in some interesting development of ideas. I expect we will learn alot about blogging through this effort. I hope that whoever reads the blog finds that we have something to add to the conversation.