Today, IT projects are critical for enterprises to thrive in this complex business environment. But, according to PwC’s report, where it reviewed more than 10,000 projects in 200 companies across the globe, only 2.5% of the enterprises successfully completed 100% of their projects. It is seriously low percentage considering in today’s times how enterprises are trying to bag business critical projects and build a sustainable growth over a period. There are many reasons why projects fail, but one of the major reasons is your organizational work culture.
Organizational work culture is directly proportional to the success rate of your projects. It is not just one project, but all the projects that are running in your organization. And organizational culture means ‘how we work around here’.
For instance, if your friend asks you how successfully your enterprise delivers projects. If you go on to say, “We are not that great at delivering projects,” you are expressing a perception of just one aspect of your organizational work culture. Organizational work culture comes into play on projects in various areas.
Process Familiarization:
Many enterprises around the world have robust processes in place and people principally follow and abide by them. And this is one of the biggest factors in your overall project success. Moreover, if your organization follows proper scalable project management processes, there is a high chance of delivering projects in a successful manner. Your project team knows processes in and out and they know how to create a work plan and effectively handle risk, scope, and change in requirements, and issues in a project.
Governance:
Though organizations have various processes in place, no one follows them. This showcases the problem with management governance of processes. Organizations should have a strong governance culture in the management/leadership which ensures the workforce is doing things in a certain way. When your management structure has a vested interest in projects, and project managers ensure project management processes are followed, then you have a higher chance of completing your projects. If there is inappropriate support from the senior management and project manager, then your project will surely fail.
Training Key Personnel:
Some of the organizations have a poor track record of training their key personnel such as project managers. In fact, not only project managers, but overall they will have a poor track record of training the workforce in general. When project managers leading the project do not have the right skill set, then the project is doomed from the start. Changing key personnel mid of the project will not help the project and there is no recovery from it.
Proper Role Delineation:
In many successful organizations, people know their job role and the responsibilities attached to it. Key personnel in an organization include project sponsors; clients; project stakeholders; project managers, and more. For instance, the project sponsors act as project champions and will be responsible to perform a quality assurance role in the organization. When your organization takes up a project and then leaves the project manager in a leadership vacuum where there is little or no coordination between the team or project stakeholders, then there is little chance of project success.
Organizational work culture plays the biggest role in determining whether you are successful in executing your projects or not. You clearly cannot blame project managers for not completing the projects successfully. It is like you are trying to fit square pegs in round holes. When the organizational work culture is not supportive of their efforts, how are they supposed to complete the project? Senior management and leadership need to step up and take ownership of evaluating project culture. Unless the culture changes, it will be very difficult for the organization to be successful.
Organizational Structure can be Both Advantageous and Disadvantageous for your Project:
To a certain degree, even your organizational structure can get in the way, or support, the overall success of your projects. But this is a problem that can be easily dealt with by changing the organizational structure. Moreover, many companies regularly change their organization chart to ensure the structure is flexible enough to accommodate robust processes. Whereas to bring a change in organizational work culture, takes a lot of time and it takes even lesser time to fall into the trap of mediocrity.
Often your organizational structure may hamper the ability to share resources within. For example, your project team needs a resource with specific expertise, but you are not able to share that resource with any other functional area. If a different organizational structure would solve the problem, then you have a problem on your hands and if it wouldn’t, then your organizational culture does not support resource sharing. If your organization is against resource sharing then it leads to resource hoarding.
Take a Step Back and See the Bigger Picture:
There are many aspects of the organization that support or inhibits project managers and their ability to be successful. You may argue culture is a broad terminology with respect to an organization, but that plays one of the biggest roles in whether you are able to deliver projects successfully or not. It is difficult to change your organizational culture all in the duration of a single project. It needs to be addressed holistically and in a multifaceted way so that when you are trying to change something, it happens over a period of time.
It has been made clear that your organizational structure can either help or hinder your project success rate. The overall structure will determine how well you focus on projects and how resource sharing happens between the organizations. By taking a holistic approach toward broader cultural problems, you will see a positive effect on organizational barriers toward project success.
