The Empowerment Culture

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Decision Making   Talent Management   Teams  

Organizations are looking for any competitive advantage they can get. One area that receives a lot of attention is project delivery, and that makes a lot of sense. Projects are how an organization delivers change, and change is the raw material of corporate growth and success. With today’s focus on minimizing the time gap between the identification of an opportunity and the delivery of a solution, combined with the need to continuously adjust solutions to meet evolving customer needs, effective project delivery can be the difference between organizational success and failure.

To respond to this, organizations have become increasingly focused on empowering project teams, allowing project managers and teams to make many of the decisions related to the project because they are closest to the work. This has many advantages — it makes the decision-making process faster, minimizing delays; it allows for changes to be made earlier, minimizing disruption; and it puts the decision-making in the hands of the people doing the work, minimizing the likelihood of mistakes.

Of course, there still has to be open, continuous communication with stakeholders, but instead of requests for formal approvals, this communication is focused on maintaining awareness of what is being done — asking for forgiveness over permission is how I often think of it. For this process to work,…

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