Voices on Project Management

By Peter Tarhanidis

New and proliferating digital technologies are giving rise to new competitive businesses while transforming legacy organizations. It’s no longer just about the Internet, but increasingly tech-savvy users and inexpensive smartphones and tablets.

From an organizational perspective, it’s not just a matter of grappling with new technical platforms: The relationship between organizations and their customers is being transformed.

Before, the cornerstone of customer service was the golden rule: treat your customers the way you want to be treated. Customer relationships were facilitated and managed within just a few departments.

Disruptive technologies have enabled a shift to a new paradigm: customer empowerment. This ushered in the new platinum rule: treat your customers the way they want to be treated. Disruptive technologies integrate organizations to their digital customer experience and are simultaneously influenced by social, consumer and professional media portals like Facebook, Yelp, NetPromoter Scores, and LinkedIn.

Now, much of the work and measurement of this activity is shared across the entire supply chain of the customer journey, which requires more cross-team collaboration to report on the customer experience.

So the importation question has become: How can we make the digital customer experience flawless? This is the new competitive differentiator for companies. Those that stand apart in this respect build market leverage.

Project managers are one asset organizations have at their disposal to ensure success with this new digital customer experience dynamic. Here’s a four-stop roadmap for optimizing your organization for the brave new digital world we all live in.

1. Establish a plan to:
   • Identify current customer journey paths.
   • Optimize those paths into one consistent and simple location.
   • Digitize that journey and make it available online, mobile and global.
2. Build the requisite foundation required to sustain the digital journey (e.g., big data analytics, and mobile-first and cloud infrastructure).
3. Transition customers from legacy operating approaches into the new digital journey with a change management plan that leads to sustainable adoption.
4. Improve the experience by acting on key performance metrics that gauge the quality of the customer’s entire journey—don’t just rely on the customer service department for quality control.

How is your organization adapting to the new realities of our digital customer age? Please take a moment and share your thoughts.

By Peter Tarhanidis

Many organizations rely on traditional curriculum-based learning to develop project leaders. However, such approaches are deeply rooted in pedagogy—the teaching of children.

Even though top managers at many organizations invest in traditional project management curricula, these courses have limited utility for adult project managers, slowing down the organization from reaching goals. In my experience, organizations tend to employ disparate training methodologies while teams dive into execution with little planning. With scattered approaches to talent management and knowledge transfer, they miss project goals.

All this creates an opportunity for an enterprise-wide approach that integrates contemporary adult learning and development practices.

Leveraging this approach allows the organization to motivate and sustain increased individual and project performance to achieve the organization’s strategic plan.

In coming up with such an approach, organizations should consider several adult learning and development theories. For example, consider Malcolm Knowles’ six aspects of successful adult learning: self-directed learning, building experiences, developing social networks, the practicability of using new knowledge, the internal drive to want to understand why, and how to use new knowledge.

And they must also keep in mind how the aging project management workforce of project managers drives organizational performance. Other considerations include:

1. Employee learning is necessary due to fast-paced changes in demographics, technology and globalization. But those employees are already busy staffing the growing demands of strategic initiatives.
2. Adult learning models should be the foundation of your training programs.
3. Traditional adult development theories must expand to include integrative learning models.
4. Self-directed learning must integrate new transformational approaches that provide for content delivery and experiential learning.
5. The impact of cognitive development processes on intelligence and aging can yield new and useful approaches to teaching and learning.

Try these eight steps to build a more flexible and integrated adult learning framework. 

1. Identify self-directed approaches for employees to acquire knowledge, information and skills, and readily apply them to meet organizational outcomes.
2. Create a learning environment that helps make sense of practitioner situations and allows for reflective dialogues to create solutions to problems and new knowledge.
3. Sponsor internal networks, social media and gaming/simulation technology to distribute information.
4. Define clear levels of learning that can be achieved by moving across boundaries. Examples of such boundaries can be small, medium, large projects or local, national, global projects.
5. Leverage experts to instruct groups. If the organization is seen to value the role of teacher, others will want to teach as well, reinforcing a continuous cycle of development.
6. Encourage learning on the job, so that an employee’s learning is based on understanding the effects of his or her actions in an environment.
7. Launch communities of practice that are based on the influence of the community to develop the group expertise.
8. Engage quick feedback through co-participation or co-emergence of learning based on everyday interactions through peers, leaders or certain situations.

New integrative learning approaches are required to increase project managers’ competence while motivating and sustaining older adult learners.

By applying these practices to critical needed competencies, organizations can create new capabilities to meet their strategic plans.

Organizations are constantly transforming their operating models and processes and investing in new technologies to achieve their business strategy.

While project leaders are focusing on executing that strategy through the discipline of project management, they are also navigating complex environments and undefined hierarchies. In some cases, initiatives stall until a path forward is agreed upon.

Establishing a decision-making process to reach consensus early in projects will ensure higher success rates. To determine a decision-making process, start by assessing the following four tensions:

1. Culture
2. Decision rights
3. Existing policies and approaches
4. Global and social influences that impact decision-making

I used this assessment approach on a recent project to ensure stakeholder and team alignment. I was able to define a procure-to-pay process that fit the culture of the organization, and stakeholders subscribed to it.

I also was able to assign decision rights across the project budget so that the suppliers and the project team would collaborate constructively during trade-off discussions and maintain the project scope.

Next, to maintain budget adherence I aligned contract and payment policies to our suppliers’ practices to validate terms, work in progress and work completed against estimates. Lastly, I was able to ensure that changes to the project scope and budget were clearly a result of sponsor-requested alterations and not due to scope mismanagement.

Looking at these four tensions helped me identify decision-making criteria that drove team collaboration, transparency in project drivers, and alignment with sponsors to meet the strategic plan. As teams endure increasing change initiatives or complex programs, many varied stakeholders will need to be engaged to ensure consensus.

Of course, project leaders can determine what other approaches exist to drive consensus early in the project initiation phase. Some examples to leverage might include:

• Robert’s Rules of Order
• Hierarchical authorization legends that define approval levels
• Operational structures that require cross-functional collaboration to drive consensus

Being aware of tensions in the decision-making process and operating structures allows project leaders to succeed in building consensus to achieve organizational goals with less complexity.