Which project management challenge deserves much more attention?

Thank you. I agree that culture matters. But can a project manager change the culture, or does it always start with senior leadership?

Great point Lissette. In your experience, what is the main reason dependencies are missed: poor communication, unclear ownership, or planning?

AMEN. Thank you Lissette. One helpful quote (John Doerr) is, "Unacknowledged interdependencies are the number one root cause of project slippages."

Interdependencies.
When we tolerate high uncertainty, high complexity, and high ambiguity in our culture, we cannot expect to manage interdependencies very well. Too many. Too subjective. Too much reinventing the wheel.

If we are going to improve "Dependency Management," we would have to commit to reducing VUCA. I'm hearing more surrendering to VUCA than I am hearing, "Let's solve VUCA."

I understand the outside world is VUCA. No one is trying to boil the ocean and solve world peace. But if you have a team of 10, 20, 50 ... you can shape the culture of a symphony. With a finite-sized team, you can define habits, activity, and productivity to dramatically improve Dependency Management.

Absolutely, a project manager can change culture ... for better or for worse.
"Leadership can come from anywhere."

“Leadership is taking people elsewhere, for THEIR benefit, where they might not go on their own.” - Chris Galvin, former CEO, Motorola & Navteq

“Leadership is about making others better as a result of your presence and making sure that impact lasts in your absence.” - Sheryl Sandburg, former Facebook COO

“Success is defined not by what you have achieved, but by what you have helped others achieve.” - Dipak Jain, Business School Dean & Professor

Plenty of workplaces have less-than-great cultures.
Plenty of executives have shaped less-than-great cultures.
Just because someone is a great climber does not make them a good leader.
Climbing is self-centric.
Leading is other-centric.

Untrustworthy executives don't deserve the positive halo of the term "leader."
Untrustworthy executives deserve the negative halo of the term "climber."
Trustworthy executives deserve the positive halo of the term "leader."
Executives do not have a monopoly on the title "leader."
Leadership is scattered around the Org Chart.

I would never wait or defer to executives to improve culture.
If executives have the ambition and skills to improve culture, they do it.
If a culture isn't great, the executives do not have the ambition and skills to improve the culture.
Leadership voids are everywhere. PMs are great candidates to fill leadership voids ... if they (we) have the ambition and skills to improve our workplace culture.

Fair?

I agree. Stakeholder alignment is often ignored at the start, but it can decide the success or failure of a project. Clear communication early saves a lot of time and effort later.

YES. Alignment. Low latency of information sharing.
What communication channel(s) are best for low latency?

Consider a restaurant.
A tiny restaurant of 2 dishes, 2 workers, 2 diners ... a written menu is overkill.
As a restaurant grows in "communication traffic," restaurants can justify the upfront cost of a written menu, or an electronic menu (PDF), and even QR codes. Scale. Scaling expectations. Why is documentation valuable? Low marginal cost to align on the Customer Experience and the Employee Experience.

We can apply the same thinking to Project Management.
The right documentation minimizes the marginal cost of stakeholder alignment.
The number of documents is finite.
So we can improve dependency management among the finite number of documents.
The right documentation is nothing short of a love letter to your future team (which you might be a member anyway).
Imagine the documentation you would want to inherit from your previous team.
Let's build that.
It's scale.
It's low marginal cost.
It's financially attractive.

Documentation isn't for the sake of documentation.
Documentation is for the sake of low latency, alignment, low marginal cost, boundaries, finiteness, and manageable interdependencies.

It's high discipline. It's high upfront cost. It's infrastructure.
Well, is our team's work worth scaling or not? Of course it is.

There's a cliche that "There is no silver bullet." You know what's pretty close to a silver bullet?
Low marginal cost. Scale.
Low latency. Alignment.
Absolutely solvable, if you'll unlearn addictions to frequency, speed, and VUCA tolerance.

I completely agree that leadership is about influence, not just authority. These quotes perfectly capture that idea.