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Eleven years ago I was working in industry, fighting
to make a struggling company survive. Everything about the enterprise
was traditional: the industry, the management structure, the business
philosophy. But nothing was working. The only apparent solution was
to create something new and abandon the traditional. In essence, it
was time to think outside the box.
It was not the first time I had broken old rules to make a venture
succeed. I had done so some years before, turning an idea into a profitable
$40 million a year enterprise—in under three years. It was a
case of project management at its best.
Survival of the fittest
Project management is at least as old as the mighty pyramids of the
Pharaohs of Egypt. But the modern context for management bears little
resemblance to that in which the planning and execution of those wonders
of the world first took place. New technology, societal change, improved
business models, faster delivery of products to market, and a myriad
of other changes have all joined forces to confound efficient management.
The popular business mantras of “continuous improvement,”
“empowerment,” “quality function deployment,”
“business process re-engineering,” and the like have become
hackneyed. These days a more appropriate analogy, I believe, is the
Darwinian concept of evolution. Adaptation to the changing environment
and survival of the fittest will determine whether an enterprise in
our 21st century will survive and flourish.
My interest in project management, nurtured by 20 years in private
industry, was given fresh focus when I moved into the world of academe
at the University of British Columbia. The move allowed me the opportunity
to look more objectively at the juncture where technology, business,
and society converge. Change is constant at this convergence and technology
is a dominant force. And every significant change is a project. So
if we study how we manage projects, it will bring insight into how
we manage technological change. More than ever, insight is badly needed
as technological development races rampantly, erratically, and exponentially,
making it both risky and bewildering for most organizations to choose
the applications they need on a daily basis.
Addressing the problem areas
It follows then that we need a much better understanding of project
management in its broadest sense. That’s because it is much more
than a detailed, critical-path schedule. To be effective, project
management must address three problem areas. First, the effective
management of projects must ensure that technical, business, and social
issues are addressed in a balanced and cohesive way. Second, the new
profession of project management must ensure that its published literature
is complete and reflects not only state-of-the-art practices, but
also reflects best practices in the workplace. Third, traditional
approaches to project management often no longer apply to increasingly
complex situations, which frequently arise from corporate change and
adoption of technology. This is where an understanding of corporate
evolution is required.
As the holder for the past seven years of an NSERC/SSHRC Chair in
the Management of Technological Change, I have been in an ideal position
to address this problem. I began my research by asking a panel of
industry experts to prepare a list of concerns and challenges relating
to the modern challenges surrounding project management. By prioritizing
this list and developing a research plan, we were able to study the
changing nature of change and its effect on how we manage it. A number
of ideas and issues arose that immediately interested us including:
contracting processes and methods; effective metrics for managing
projects; better ways of planning; managing geographically distributed
teams; competencies of project managers and their team members; value
engineering; and specific industry best practices in the management
of schedule, cost, and performance.
As my students, colleagues, and I made inroads on these topics, two
significant findings emerged. The first was that the individual tools,
processes, and competencies that worked cohesively and synergistically
in the best examples of technology project management were not normally
all found together in practice. For example, at the simplest level,
practitioners tend to plan activities, estimate costs by work packages,
and manage by deliverables. Yet where the tools and processes were
cohesive (all based on deliverables), better performance was evident.
Another example of this? Live television routinely delivers projects
on time—the six o’clock news starts on time every day. It
soon became apparent that successful delivery was linked to an appropriate
balance of business, technical, and social issues.
Our next step? We undertook to assemble a series of cohesive and balanced
tools, processes, and competencies into a presentation package that
we could test on live projects. Labeled SMART
Management™ (link downloads a 600K PowerPoint presentation),
the framework was first used in controlled test beds and then on real
projects with a number of companies that supported our work.
Reaping the rewards: faster, cheaper, better
Since those early days, the SMART Management™ approach to project,
program, and corporate management has been used on several hundred
projects in various forms. It has also been adopted and adapted by
a growing number of companies. These companies are starting to reap
the rewards of adding best practices to their suite of competencies,
with the result that projects are delivered faster, more cheaply,
and with better quality. In turn, their customers are benefiting from
improved products, timely delivery, and competitive pricing—while
the users are gaining market advantage and greater returns. In all,
over 70 companies in Canada, the United States, and Europe have been
involved in its development and use. SMART Management Inc. and Quality
Enhanced Decisions Inc. are two companies spun off from this work.
The second finding to emerge from our research was a single common
element that was isolated and identified as being significant in all
issues we investigated. And that is trust. When trust is absent in
an organization, effective change is disabled. Trust is critical to
the successful enterprise, and understanding it from the perspective
of both a business and a “mechanical” point of view is now
the object of our research. Trust has now become the focus of the
NSERC/SSHRC Chair, supported fully by my industry advisors.
A mechanical model, which breaks down trust into three distinct types,
has been developed and tested against classical cases from the extensive
literature on this intriguing subject. This model is now being validated
through empirical data collection. And through a series of diverse
research projects, we are looking at the role of trust on specific
aspects of the change-management process. Where does the value of
this work lie? In opening opportunities to create better-managed,
supply-and-demand chains; improved contracting with lower overheads;
faster team building; better relationships between geographically
separated teams; improved communication; and development of the elements
in an enterprise that allow people to trust their own management and
organizational leadership.
In its business planning, every enterprise has at least two objectives.
These objectives are inextricably linked but often require different
approaches. The first is survival. This includes adapting to changing
circumstances, which in turn means reorganization, harnessing new
technologies in both production and delivery, and other changes that
can reflect an aspect of organizational evolution. The second objective
is planning for growth, new products, and improvements in performance
in other ways—ways that will embrace research and development,
better production and delivery methods, and a quest for new or better
markets. Both objectives require evolution of the organization and
the skills of its employees. Some skills will become redundant. Some
skills will be in short supply. While others will be completely new.
The organization will adapt to these changes by restructuring to accommodate
new departments and groups, and it will heal over where redundancy
has occurred.
We need to recognize that each of these changes can be managed as
a project with clear objectives and deliverables, known metrics for
success, and alignment to the overall corporate strategy. We also
need to appreciate that to achieve better enterprise evolution in
the technology arena, we will need to change our organizational model
from a static one (that we rework from time to time) to a dynamic
one that is more fluid and responsive.
The organizations that are doing this are also looking at their business
less as operation based, and more as a series of projects to challenge
and improve every aspect of what they do. This shift helps us to understand,
limit, and better control the changes that are occurring. It also
allows us to use a more thoughtful approach to the business, technical,
and organizational issues that such changes create.
Rapid and diverse changes are impacting every organization. Our research
program at the University of Calgary—made possible by NSERC and
SSHRC, and industry support for the Chair Program in the Management
of Technological Change—has introduced a new way to manage change.
First we determine what is needed, and then we provide a cohesive
and strategic approach to manage the change. The growing use of these
research findings has already helped many organizations manage their
business more effectively and cohesively at every stage and at every
level. In addition, the research program has brought about significant
performance improvements in the management of technological change,
and in other changes that are part of the continuous evolution of
enterprises.
After all these years, this fascinating and growing area of study
continues to hold my interest. I am mindful how much of that interest
arises from seeing research findings adopted by industry, and hearing
the "ahas" from my graduate and undergraduate students as
they find tools to help them in their careers.
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