Organized Change

Innovative thinking

In our posting “Not just any leadership,” we talked about “innovative thinking.” There has never been a time when this concept has had a greater importance for us as project management practitioners. We are operating in a new economy today that is marked by unprecedented levels of global competition among individuals, businesses, and nations. Our profession of project management is evolving where we find ourselves in a global workplace where many of our projects are unconstrained by time zones, geographical location, differences in language, corporate boundaries, or national governments.

This past year, we have had the opportunity to meet with many of you in face-to-face discussions on issues of project management and leadership. In addition, we have met with many business leaders to understand their perspectives on project management and leadership. And what we are hearing are two different perceptions.

For us, as project management practitioners, we define success in the context of, “on time and within budget.” With business leaders, success is defined entirely different. For them, success is the ability to sustain and grow the organization.

With markets diminishing or even disappearing, business leaders want to know if they will we be here 5 years from now. The biggest single trend we have heard from business leaders is the growing acknowledgement of innovation as the centerpiece of corporate strategies and initiatives.

Organizations are finding themselves in situations that are so competitive they cannot optimize their way out of them. They have to innovate their way out of them. Management guru Gary Hamel says, “Most organizations today are built for continuous improvement, rather than disruptive innovation. They know how to get better, but they don’t know how to get different” (Sloane, 2003, p. 5).

As project management practitioners, we work from a mindset of continuous improvement—and that a good thing, but in today’s economy disruptive innovation is better. This will requires us to change our perspective on a few things. What are those few things? Right now, two come to mind. First, the vision thing we discussed a couple of postings back. The second is how we look at risk. We'll talk some more on both of these in future postings.

Steve & Diana

Reference

Sloane, P., (2003). The leader’s guide to lateral thinking skills. Kogan-Page Limited: London.

Not just any leadership, but project leadership

In our posting “Whittling down the subject matter,” Diana stated that she will be looking at the soft skills of project management for her doctoral studies. She specifically said she wanted to look into, “not just any leadership, but project leadership.” I love that! It begins to crystallize the type of focus we needs as researchers and hopefully, you need as readers in what we are trying to contribute.

For the past year we have been studying “Leadership” with a capital “L.” We have read on the different leadership styles, theories, and traits. Leadership, a single word with many ambiguous definitions but, project leadership begins to have meaning for us. When you hear or read about leadership, you will invariably hear or read about creating a vision. I like visions. I think they are a necessity in establishing what you want to do for your project (as in a project leader), your organization (as in a business leader), or your life (as your own leader).

What peeves us is Leadership, with a capital “L,” usually stops at the end of the vision. It leaves a void on how the vision is to be implemented. That’s where project leadership comes into play. Project leaders (project managers) can execute a plan better than anyone. It is the hallmark of our profession. So the term, project leader, resonates with us because we can get things done.

But, one of the things we don’t do well as project management profession is the vision thing. Too much left-brain and not enough right. Either, Leaders with a capital “L,” need to have more of the skill sets of project management or project leaders need to learn about this vision thing. Who manages the gap between vision and execution? That is where we see, as project leaders, we need to become proficient at “innovative thinking.”

Now, what does “innovative thinking” mean? Stay tune for another posting.

Steve & Diana

Whittling down the subject matter

In our last posting Research design--choosing a logical approach to investigation, we mentioned that our subject matter of how project management influences organizational change projects needed to be broken down into finer detail. Well, we stood back and looked at ourselves, our talents, interests, and personalities and came to a logical conclusion. We are going to break our subject matter of project management down into the hard and soft skills.

We are defining the hard skills of project management that relate to scope development, schedule development, cost estimating, and risk management. We are defining the soft skills leadership, communication, team development, and conflict negotiations.

For Steve, his area of focus will be project estimating or the lack of project estimating. For Diana, her area of focus will be project leadership. Steve contends that a good project estimate leads to project success. Diana says it is leadership and not just any leadership, but project leadership. That is going to need a definition, but that’s another posting.

Which one do you think contributes to project success/failure? Hard skills or soft skills?

Steve & Diana

Research design--choosing a logical approach to investigation

Our research in “organized change” will follow a scientific approach to investigation. We have certain hunches based on observations of why organizational change projects fail or succeed. These identified problems/opportunities will evolve into a workable theory which is a set of statements based off of what researchers called their, “grand questions.”

Our “grand question” will evolve over the next year. At this point in time, we are unsure what the actual focus of our dissertations will be. We have a general idea where we are heading, but our educational advisors keep reminding us to “whittle down” our topic to very specific events and variables that can be studied.

Because our doctoral studies are independent studies, we will take the massive subject of organizational change and will look at how project management either helps or hinders organizational change projects. In today’s world of high technological advancements, organizational change projects have a high involvement of information systems or information technology. We believe that most IS/IT projects are, in fact, organizational change projects which leads us to the question, “What is the definition of an organizational change project?” So this may be the first of a series of questions to be asked to “whittle down” our very broad research into something more manageable.

Our research design will be qualitative rather than quantitative which provides us the opportunity to get face-to-face with our subject and the people who are involved in organizational change projects. This can be achieved through interviews and case studies of people, projects, and organizations. We will also use surveys and questionnaires to support our findings, but will rely more on the relevancy of people’s experience than on the numbers derived from the data. There is always a personal story behind the numbers.

For now, we are still working on “whittling down” this subject to finer detail.

Steve & Diana

PM Component Usage Survey

This is our first survey of many over the next 3-4 years that we will be conducting as part of our doctoral studies. We will begin our research investigation on organizational change looking at the project management component processes. Our first survey will establish a benchmark to see which project management component processes are being used, but more importantly, which component processes are not being used. We will analysis the results based on different project parameters such as industry, project type, project size, and project experience.

We’ll say it again, this is our first survey. There are a lot of things we will do right, but there will be a lot of things we’ll do wrong. Bear with us as we get ramped up on developing surveys and the technology we will use to conduct them. There is an art and science in developing surveys to collect the right data to analyze. We are collaborating with Dr. Jeffery Hornsby, Ball State University’s Midwest Entrepreneurial Education Center.

We will provide partial results of the survey in two venues. First, we will hold an Open-Form Discussion on the PM Component Process Usage Survey. These discussions are open to the participants. The idea is to share insights of what we learned and to listen to what project management practitioners have to say about the survey. The second venue will be to post partial results on our website and with the PMI chapters who sponsored our survey announcement. We do this in the belief of advancing the profession project management by contributing to the knowledgebase.

Because of the academic requirements, we cannot offer the full survey results. It has to do with the fact that “original data,” is fundamental to doctoral research. Also there are considerations with intellectual property rights and other academia stuff. Who knew? We will be meeting with our academic advisors and to discuss the rules and regulations required for our doctoral studies.

Thanks for participating in the survey and keep checking back, it’s going to get interesting.

Steve & Diana