Out on the Carpet: Confronting Our Organizational Challenges
Mark Mullaly is president of Interthink Consulting Incorporated, an organizational development and change firm specializing in the creation of effective organizational project management solutions. Since 1990, it has worked with companies throughout North America to develop, enhance and implement effective project management tools, processes, structures and capabilities. Mark was most recently co-lead investigator of the Value of Project Management research project sponsored by PMI. You can read more of his writing at markmullaly.com.
So what is an organization that wants better results to do? While projects continue to get larger, the challenges of managing them consistently grow with them. The underlying problems are remarkably consistent across organizations, and the recommendations that typically get proposed are also fairly widely agreed to as being reasonable. So the question remains--what is getting in the way of projects actually getting better?
Last month's column continued our discussion of the challenges organizations face in conducting large information technology projects. This series--based upon the report of a task force investigation into the management of large IT projects published by the government of the province of Ontario, Canada--explored a number of core findings and recommendations. The challenge, as noted last month, is that while many of the recommendations are sensible and they are recognized good practice, they don't necessarily find the traction required for organizations to realize consistent success.
For the recommendations to be reasonable and the results to remain elusive can only mean one thing--that there is something else missing from our organizational approach to managing projects. For the approaches and suggestions of the task force report to work, there are underlying capabilities that must also be present. If this assumption is correct, the missing capabilities …
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