Organizational Culture and Process: The Agile Impact

  Agile  

Imagine you just finished working on a multi-year, multi-million-dollar strategic project that meets stakeholder expectations, delivers on performance and is delivered on time. But it still faces resistance from the team that is actually going to use it. What gives? Experienced project managers are all too familiar with this question, and one of the obvious answers is that no one likes change and the resistance is just one of the necessary steps to acceptance. This is partly correct, but it is not the whole part of the equation. One thing that is often overlooked is to what extent an organization’s culture plays a part in this resistance, how well positioned it is to make this strategic shift smoothly and what would it take to overcome this obstacle.

An organization’s capabilities are in its resources and the processes, which form the basis of its culture. The organization’s culture and processes are geared toward helping it do things in an efficient manner--but with this efficiency comes complacency. The same culture that leads to efficiency and profitability when the “going is good” (or it’s “business as usual”) may not hold up very well when there is a change in the business environment or business practices.

For example, during years of focusing on building high-profit margin trucks--where the organizational culture…

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