Tài liệu Creating the project office 9 pptx

deals, and gaining power and resources for their departments or projects to fur- ther corporate, rather than entirely personal, ends.” It’s Really a Power Thing The power wielded by a project office spans the spectrum from a sometimes weak- kneed project support office to the powerful concept of the chief project officer (Dins- more, 2001). Naturally, this ambiguous span of power raises questions in the minds of other stakeholders. This in turn sets off conscious or unconscious resistance. The PO, while seen as a savior by some, begins to look like a big bad wolf to others. For that reason, project office efforts may get shot down before they get off the ground—even if concrete technical reasons buttress the well-intentioned movement. The causes that sabotage a PO’s inception range from power plays to subtle undermining. Here are the players that can keep POs from taking hold or ultimately cause their demise: • Big-time steamrollers. Top managers often have strong views about how to orga- nize work, perhaps with a strong process stance or quality view. Although the PO approach is not inconsistent with other management tacks, the PO may be seen as unnecessary organizational baggage, under the assumption that projects should somehow work without PO support. The PO movement then is steam- rolled under the pressure of other top management priorities. • Lateral roadblockers. These players sit at the same level as the champions of the PO cause. Resistance comes from the flanks, sparked by lack of information, poor understanding of how other areas will be affected, and fear that the ini- tiative will reduce the roadblockers’ relative power base within the organization. • Oblique snipers. Managers with diagonal relationships may take potshots at an attempt to restructure work using a project office tack. Their power base may be threatened or they may not know enough about the concept to support it. • Grassroots sandbaggers. At the project level, professionals are unlikely to get en- thused about dealing with an area that may exercise control or interfere with the status quo. Unless a real benefit is shown to project practitioners (what’s in it for me?), then natural indifference and resistance will build and the PO ef- fort is likely to be met with crossed arms and foot dragging. A Rose Has Its Thorns Although the PO may be seen as a sweet-smelling solution, it comes with thorny organizational power issues. Here are some of the reasons people may resist: 58 Creating the Project Office • The ignorance factor. Even highly intelligent people are ignorant (not knowledge- able) about certain topics. An engineer may be merrily unaware of the glories of marketing, and a psychologist may ignore the concepts of information tech- nology. Managers and executives may not be schooled in the concepts of man- aging multiple projects. And they are all unlikely to support what they do not understand. • Poor pitching. The concept must be appropriately pitched to the stakeholders. If conscious time and effort are not put into selling the idea to all those who will be affected, then backlash is a probable by-product. • No custom fit. The proposed version of the PO will work only if it fits the com- pany culture and the situation at hand. If there is no logical technical justifi- cation for implementing a PO, then resistance will be high. • Rowing upstream. The political moment has to be right. Mergers may be in the wind, or major market shifts, any of which may move the project office out of the river—or over the edge of the waterfall. Or there may be an internal power battle that blacklists your proposal. So Why Insist? It is not smart to enter battles you cannot win. So why insist if people do not clap and cheer at your proposal for implementing or reinforcing a PO effort? First, it is important to verify that a project office is viable and makes sense. A PO is not the universal cure for all organizational ailments and may not apply at all in certain situations. If, for example, people are trained and motivated, methodologies are in place, and tools, software, and hardware are readily avail- able—and a healthy, thriving synergistic project atmosphere exists—then there may be no need for a project office. Or, if the company is primarily process- oriented and works in a stable, nonchanging environment, a PO would be an un- necessary luxury. Yet if those conditions are lacking and the setting is fast paced and constantly changing, then the organization probably needs a projectized culture to meet mar- ket demands and generate desired results. One way to do this is through a project office. If the need indeed exists, then it is worth pushing ahead. How to Deal With the Power Ploys None of the players mentioned as potential opponents are bad guys, out to sab- otage efforts to improve company productivity. They are well-intentioned profes- sionals concerned with getting their work done, naturally resistant to anything that might interfere with their activities or seem unnecessary for the organization to Powerful Forces 59 produce results. So to overcome these barriers, develop a strategy to deal with power-related issues. Here are some hints: • Don’t hurry the river. Things take time. Develop a strategy for involving people and getting buy-in and implementation over time. • Show benefit to the organization and to the stakeholders. Although logical technical ben- efit to the organization is basic, the stakeholders all have their own selfish rea- sons to support or reject such an effort. Benefit, from the standpoint of each individual, must be shown and understood. • Look for a champion. Don’t try to carry the flag by yourself. Develop strong sup- port and avoid labeling the effort as “my idea.” Look for support at a sponsor level and create a critical mass of support. Sponsorship Schwab established a project office that supported functional business units. A se- nior manager provided the backbone that led to perceived value that it was eas- ier to do business better. Then he left the company. There was a nine-month gap before a successor was named. The project office was rudderless, and its value was not promoted or demonstrated across the organization. Lack of management pri- oritization led to too many people doing too many projects and making a lot of work for themselves. Then people in the PO were laid off or dispersed into busi- ness units. Kent Harmon, director of R&D effectiveness at Texas Instruments, noticed a similar phenomenon: the time required to implement a project office often ex- ceeds the tenure of its executive sponsor. “It would be interesting to do process control charts for supervisor tenure,” he says. “It’s like finding the longest pole in a tent and making it shorter. It’s unbelievable but management often assumes zero productivity loss will be incurred by these actions. Plotting success rate versus size of the organization would probably show midsize organizations are more suc- cessful. Our salvation is to turn despair to humor.” He predicts the cycle time for a typical project office implementation at five to seven years. The HP Project Man- agement Initiative operated on a ten-year cycle. The good news is that an executive sponsor helps make a PO successful. The bad news is that it is tough to keep your sponsor around. There are pros and cons about where in the organization you recruit this sponsor and how to make the choice. Someone high in the organization, say at the vice presidential level, should certainly have enough power and experience to be effective. But make sure you ask the key questions: Are they interested? Do they have enough time? Will they be 60 Creating the Project Office positioned for the next five to seven years to see the implementation through? It is also desirable that a sponsor come from a powerful and important part of the organization. Such a paragon may not be available; it may be necessary to trade off some power and position for enthusiasm and time. It may only be possible to get someone from the departmental level. If this is the case, than it seems doubly important to ensure that your sponsor is from a powerful department that is cen- tral to the success of the organization. The rise and fall of a project office appears as a common theme. This may be a natural sequence as needs of an organization change. Sometimes it becomes obvious from political maneuverings among individuals that the project office has outlived its usefulness or is antithetical to their needs. The Spectrum Program Management group at HP (described in Chapter Four) experienced this activity when functional managers disagreed with how the office was run. Additional ex- amples in Chapters Seven and Eight show how useful it can be to put extraordi- nary efforts into cultivating and maintaining sponsor relationships. Political Plan The quest to implement a project office requires a political management plan. One key element is to conduct a stakeholder analysis (see Chapter Seven for one way to do this). You quickly realize that it is impossible to satisfy everyone and that the goal might become to keep everyone minimally annoyed and use a “weighted dissatisfaction” index (Pinto, 1996, pp. 41–42). Analysis of common success factors indicates that project leaders need to pay attention to the needs of project stakeholders as well as those of project team mem- bers. Identifying stakeholders early on leads to better stakeholder management throughout the project. Use diagnostic tools to analyze project office stakeholders. A stakeholder is anyone who has a reason to care about the effort—sponsoring the change, or dependent upon, supplying, or executing it. Ask “Who could stop this effort?” You can build a compass like the one shown in Figure 3.1 to identify these players. Write down names and get to know people in each area. What motivates them, how are they measured, what are their concerns? One approach is to assess whether they support the effort or not and whether their organizational impact is high or low. With that assessment in hand, act ac- cordingly: • High support, low impact. Stakeholders who support the project but do not have a lot of power to change or defend it should be kept informed and nurtured. It is important to keep the support of these stakeholders—but not as important Powerful Forces 61 as it is to keep the support of stakeholders with both high support and high impact. • Low support, low impact. Stakeholders who oppose the project and have little im- pact on it should not be ignored, but their comments and input into the project are not as important as are those of others. Keep these stakeholders informed of what is going on with the project. Try to make sure that these stakeholders do not inspire other, more influential stakeholders to oppose the project. • Low support, high impact. Stakeholders who oppose the project office and have a lot of power over it should be watched carefully throughout the life of the proj- ect. These stakeholders should not be ignored. Communicate regularly with them and make attempts to determine how the project office can support their interests. Use change management and persuasion techniques to build support. • High support, high impact. Nurture these stakeholders throughout the life of the project. Keep them informed of everything that is happening with the project office and leverage their support and impact to help gain support for the project from stakeholders with lower levels of support or counter opposition from those who actively oppose the project. They may be able to increase the impact of less powerful stakeholders who support the project. • Neutral. Neutral stakeholders have the potential to go either way—either to- ward support for or opposition to the project office. Use influence techniques to gain their support. This is particularly important for neutral stakeholders who have high potential impact on the project. 62 Creating the Project Office FIGURE 3.1. USE COMPASS TO IDENTIFY STAKEHOLDERS. Me N S W E NE NW SW SE Management chain Other entities Direct reports Regulatory agencies Customers and users Field or factory Vendors Other functional areas Creating a Stakeholder Strategy Berger and others (1994, 1998) describe useful sets of things to do and avoid when it comes to dealing differentially with stakeholder supporters and stakeholder re- sistors. For supporters, they recommend enrolling stakeholders in the change process, offering them ownership roles in it, and actively soliciting their opinions and listening to their ideas. Despite their initial support, it is unwise to expect them to manage or lead the change effort, and important not to dismiss or ignore their ideas—expect too much or too little of them, and you may lose them. For those who start out by opposing the idea, he recommends illustrating and reframing the change in terms of how it will benefit them personally, acknowledging the prob- lems they identify and using them to determine if all options have been explored, and inviting them to voice their reluctance or resistance. It is crucial not to dis- miss or ignore resistors in the hope that they will just go away, as they will con- tinue to work for their own goals whether or not you watch them. Likewise, it is dangerous to assume that someone who resists one change will be a resistor for all changes—people have different priorities on different issues. It is easy to create opposition for yourself by expecting it instead of starting with an open door. Another approach is to diagnose levels of trust and agreement with each stakeholder (see Figure 3.2). Based on the outcome of that diagnostic, modify your approach to getting their commitment. Approach stakeholders in each area starting from the position of strength. For example, when trust is high but agreement about the change is low, start by reinforcing the effective working relationship that exists. Express desire that this bond will again help the two of you work through the differences. Only after es- tablishing agreement on these objectives should you address the problem area. Powerful Forces 63 FIGURE 3.2. DIAGNOSE STAKEHOLDERS. Source: Adapted from Block, 1991. High Agreement Low Comrades Adversaries Allies Opponents High Trust Fence-Sitters People often jump right into the problem. This prompts defensive behavior from the other person. Taking time to reestablish rapport first can prove far more ef- fective in helping reach a mutually satisfying solution. Another element of a political plan is positioning. Where the project office is located in an organization affects its power base. The concept of “centrality” says locate it in a position central and visible to other corporate members, where it is central to or important for organizational goals (Pinto, 1996, p. 57). The HP Project Management Initiative started in Corporate Engineering, a good place to be because HP was an engineering company. That put the initiative into the mainstream instead of in a peripheral organization where its effectiveness and exposure may be more limited. Likewise, a project office for the personal com- puter division reported through a section manager to the R&D functional man- ager. This again reflected centrality since R&D at that time drove product development efforts. Most important decisions in organizations involve the allocation of scarce re- sources. Position and charter a project office with a key role in decision making that is bound to the prioritization and distribution of organizational resources. Be there to help, not make decisions. Put managers at ease and help them recognize that they are not losing decision-making power, they are gaining an ally to facili- tate and implement decisions. Implicit in creating a new order is the notion that conflict is inevitable. The use of power and politics becomes a mechanism for resolving conflict. Politics is a natural consequence of the interaction between organizational subsystems. A project office is best seen as a helping hand, there not to create conflict but to pro- vide skilled facilitation leading to effective and efficient resolution. When people find that telling their problems to the program manager helps them get speedy resolution instead of recrimination, they feel they have a true friend, one they can- not do without. A well-known political tactic is to demonstrate your legitimacy and expertise. Developing proficiency and constantly employing new best practices around pro- gram and project management, plus communicating and promoting the services and successes achieved, help the project office gain status in the organization. Combined with recruitment of sponsors and management of stakeholder rela- tions, these measures often add up to an effective political plan. This factor is a recurring theme in all case studies in this book. Pinto says, “Any action or change effort initiated by members of an organi- zation that has the potential to alter the nature of current power relationships pro- vides a tremendous impetus for political activity” (1996, p. 77). Such is the purview of a project office for organizational change. 64 Creating the Project Office Developing High-Level Commitment: A Business Case This case is based on the American Productivity & Quality Center’s report of a benchmarking study of Hewlett-Packard Consulting, detailing how HP became interested in developing a knowledge management system in 1995. Recognizing that sharing knowledge among projects, learning from others’ successes and mis- takes, and capturing reusable material from engagements was essential to success, HP management wondered why the sharing and leverage of knowledge was not occurring more often and more effectively. What needed to be done to make this behavioral change happen? Customers expect innovation, rapid execution, and global consistency. They also want to tap into Hewlett-Packard’s collective knowledge when they engage HP Consulting for their projects. Obstacles existed primarily on an organizational level. Silo mentalities im- peded knowledge sharing, which was neither measured nor rewarded. Providing slack time for employees to share knowledge was a challenge. Nonstandardized selling and implementing procedures for the same solution across the globe chal- lenged the sharing of consistent solutions. Information was scattered all over the organization and not accessible. In the past, investment in managing knowledge was sporadic, bounded by organization structures, and focused on technology. Overcoming Obstacles The implementation team began by explicitly stating that knowledge was the cur- rency of their business. The team emphasized that the organization’s ability to grow would be directly affected by its ability to manage knowledge efficiently and effectively across all segments of the company. The team realized it had to sell its business case to senior management and secure proper management sponsorship. The team knew that sponsorship could not come from a token head only but instead had to reflect involved, passionate sponsorship. It also had to include a senior-level manager who was willing to be- come intimately involved in building the initiative. The team used a parable of the biblical figure Moses to engage sponsors in understanding their role and what was needed to make the initiative a success. In this story, a committed and involved leader (Moses) had a vision (leading his people out of bondage and into a land of milk and honey) and a high-level sponsor (God) who was able to remove obstacles (the Red Sea). Moses played a direct role in bringing the people to the promised land. (He took the lead in crossing the Red Sea into the Powerful Forces 65 desert and led them to the Promised Land instead of simply checking on the groups’ progress on a quarterly basis!) At the end of this story, the newly appointed VP and general manager stepped forward and said, “I’ll be Moses.” This began a wave of support by the global leadership team that saw the initiative through its first couple of years. The actions that followed were in the footsteps of Moses. The general man- ager was highly involved in developing the initiative, gaining and sustaining support from the leadership team, communicating to the organization about the importance of knowledge management, and working closely with the team. Right Makes Might? The implementation team described in the preceding section was fortunate to en- counter upper managers who would either initiate or support the project. More often, program managers encounter unrealistic schedule demands, too few re- sources, and too much to do. They find themselves between a rock and a hard place when they try to speak this truth back to those in power. Some have asserted that science itself is not fundamentally driven by the search for truth. People who thought truth was an easy thing to discover often find how difficult it can be to pin a new idea down. To counter the belief that science is a clean, steady progression to a full understanding of all phenomena, Kuhn (1996) illustrates that it moves by jumps and starts, with periodic changes in the equilibrium of things. Empirical research (Larson and King, 1996) has found that information is often distorted and manipulated in organizations. Subordinates want to send fa- vorable information quickly and accurately to managers, but they generally pre- fer to distort or block unfavorable information. Similarly, managers want to accept information favorable to their self-image and beliefs and to reject or misinterpret negative or critical information. The change agent team will be speaking to very powerful people and some of the news may not be to their liking. Being “right” may not always help. Speaking Truth to Power It is often difficult to get upper management properly involved in project man- agement processes. The truth is that upper managers may need to change their ways to properly support and facilitate progress. It is even more difficult to give upper managers bad news, especially when some of the news may be due to their own lack of foresight and involvement. A key ingredient for prosperity that a project office can offer is the cooperative partnership established with manage- 66 Creating the Project Office ment. This section explores ways that program managers can get the message through to people in power. The key elements for change agents to speak truth to power are determining what is bad about the news, defining and delivering the truth, using your strengths, creating intent and motivation, and getting it done. Changes or projects that demonstrably help solve upper managers’ problems while contributing to the over- all welfare of the organizations have a much higher probability of receiving en- thusiastic support. Speak that truth to the powers in your organization. When constructing messages you expect people do not want to hear, first un- derstand why that is the case. Sometimes the news is just too different from what they are used to; sometimes it means they might lose power or status. It may run counter to what they want from the world, or they may have what appear to be good reasons to avoid thinking about it, or it may simply seem overwhelming. The news is different. The truth often goes against the grain, against the way people have learned what is true and thus the way they have ordered the world. For example, Galileo was labeled a heretic for proposing that the earth revolved around the sun. This idea, which was true, went against years believing and teach- ing that earth was at the center of the universe. Belief in the new order of the universe meant that many years of believing had to be abandoned, and this is dif- ficult to do. Most people will not abandon such strongly held beliefs unless they are in real pain, unless there is good reason to do so. People could lose power. In Galileo’s case, the authorities knew that if they ac- cepted the idea of the sun as center of the universe, going against what they had said for years, they would lose their long-held power to define the world. That would reduce their influence, which would be likely to reduce the resources avail- able to them. Upper managers sense a loss of power to core teams. Functional managers lose power to project offices. Whenever news means a loss of power for someone in the organization, expect resistance to believing the news. People want it another way. Many times people do not want to hear what you have to say because they want it another way. In Japan prior to 1858, people in power wanted to remain in isolation rather than trade with the United States. Those who stated an unpopular opinion were executed, perhaps in hope that if all new thinkers were gone then people could revert to the old ways. People may believe that one way to remain the same is to get rid of all people who want change. The news may be overshadowed by other circumstances. The truth may not be heard because of tradition. For example, telling a sailing ship’s captain he might be wrong in calculating longitude was considered insubordination and thus grounds for death, despite the truth of the message. It took the loss of four ships and thou- sands of sailors (sense of urgency) before England’s Parliament (guiding coalition) Powerful Forces 67 . sure you ask the key questions: Are they interested? Do they have enough time? Will they be 60 Creating the Project Office positioned for the next five to. but their comments and input into the project are not as important as are those of others. Keep these stakeholders informed of what is going on with the project.