Volume IX - Issue IX - September 2007
Featured Papers
Linking Strategy, Leadership and Organization Culture By Lawrence Suda Editor’s note: This paper was prepared for the 1st UTD Project Management Symposium, held in Plano, Texas, USA on August 6, 2007. It was selected for publication in PM World Today by the conference committee and is included here with permission of the author and the Graduate Program in Project Management at the University of Texas at Dallas. The concept of organization culture is not new. For many decades, the influence of culture on an organization has been the focus of significant research and study – and for good reason: culture shapes its decision patterns, guides its actions and drives individual behavior of all its members. Culture is potent. It can block an organization’s (or project’s) strategy, or it can catalyze it. Put simply, culture “is the way we do things around here to succeed.” On a deeper level, it’s the shared beliefs, norms, symbols, values and attitudes that permeate all parts of the organization. These enduring patterns help provided stability, (an important benefit), for the organization. But a strong culture can also erect barriers to getting the results needed to remain competitive. Project leaders lacking cultural awareness can become restricted and handicapped by the values and beliefs of the base organization’s culture. They can have difficulty understanding and adapting to different norms and behaviors across the organization. By contrast, enlightened project leaders have a strong connection to their cultures. They are more sensitive and capable of interacting with other kinds of cultures and are more adaptable, flexible and effective. In this paper I discuss how culture influences behavior. As experienced practitioners, our purpose is to help project leaders gain a better understanding of organizational culture and all that entails: its landscape, its underlying process, how it develops, how to identify characteristics and attributes of core culture types, and how to develop ways for recognizing, changing and adapting to their behavior while working with dissimilar cultures. Once gained, this knowledge will not only make project leaders more effective, but will help them achieve their planned results. I will also discuss the ways in which we describe culture, and the critical link between strategy, culture and leadership behaviors. This paper is grounded in theory and is both descriptive and prescriptive, while offering suggestions that can help project leaders understand their own culture and that of others. I hope it serves as an aid to making projects more successful
The Project Manager’s Role as an interface Editor’s note: This paper was prepared for the 1st UTD Project Management Symposium, held in Plano, Texas, USA on August 6, 2007. It was selected for publication in PM World Today by the conference committee and is included here with permission of the author and the Graduate Program in Project Management at the University of Texas at Dallas. Abstract This paper will discuss how a Project Manager serves as an interface between a company’s profit driven business centers, the expense driven I/T infrastructure and the company’s overall corporate governance operation. By understanding the needs and requirements of these areas the Project Manager becomes a critical piece of an effective and efficient corporate governance environment. Good Corporate Governance establishes a platform for defining business objectives and for measuring performance in reaching those objectives. The Project Manager is critical for managing the tasks to achieve the business objectives, providing the data needed for measuring performance in reaching those objectives and communicating the results to the Corporate Governance Board. Paper The size and scope of corporate scandals in recent years has increased pressure on companies to provide an appropriate level of corporate governance so that the marketplace will remain confident in a companies’ ability to perform. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), corporate governance is defined as “providing the structure for determining organizational objectives and monitoring performance to ensure that objectives are attained“ (Weill and Ross 2004, 4). As companies continue to migrate towards a corporate governance environment, the emergence of project portfolio management as a support tool has created a new role or responsibility for project managers. The project manager is an interface between corporate governance’s senior management, I/T infrastructure and business units. A project manager needs to understand this new role because it will add value to the corporate governance process and demonstrate the critical value a project manager provides in a company’s strategic objectives. Read complete paper in English
Rethinking the Risk Management Process:
Over the past three years I have been rethinking the risk management process for several reasons but most are directly focused on the need to communicate risk. As program and project managers, we can no longer act as if this aspect of risk management will happen in the course of the management of the project or in the act of communicating other aspects of the project. It just does not happen or it does not happen adequately. Therefore rather than the models we have come to know where we speak to the steps of planning, assessment: identification and qualitative/quantitative analysis, handling, and monitoring and reporting. The model proposed now includes the process step of documentation and communication. Often documentation was consumed by the planning stage or considered a part of each step, as was communication. Unfortunately, it was not always considered vital or even part of the iterative and continuous part of this overall process. Read complete paper in English
Tip-Toeing into Agile Project Management
Editor’s note: This paper was prepared for the 1st UTD Project Management Symposium, held in Plano, Texas, USA on August 6, 2007. It was selected for publication in PM World Today by the conference committee and is included here with permission of the author and the Graduate Program in Project Management at the University of Texas at Dallas. Introduction What is all this we are hearing about Agile Project Management? How is it different from standard PM? Can all projects run as Agile or are there only some that it can be used for? I hear there is an Agile Project Management Methodology. How is it different from the standard Project Management Methodology and can the two be intertwined? Do you have to plunge into the deep end to go to Agile or can you wade in at the kiddie pool? All these questions and others faced us at Brink’s Inc. when we considered moving into Agile. We had not had much success in the standard project methodology and heard that some companies were being successful with Agile. So we got the latest books and attended seminars to learn more about it. Just about all the books said you needed to go to the full Agile Methodology, including the templates and processes set up for Agile. Read complete paper in English
Churchill’s Communication Plan By Mark Kozak-Holland Most people are very familiar with Winston Churchill but may not be familiar with his “agile” approach to project management and his skills as a PM in the summer of 1940. Part 12 looked at Churchill’s choices of what to do and the designs for a solution. This article discusses how Churchill put in place a communication plan to bolster morale in the Government, media, and public. Communications management is fundamental to Project Management in today’s world (one of the nine PMBOK knowledge areas) in managing expectations. Change is constant in an Agile project, and as a result constant communication is the best way of maintaining the connections between all the participants. Practically all projects have internal and external audiences, and importantly the messages differ in content and tone, as well as timing, for example:
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