 The Editor's Desk
Here’s another weather-related story – you know, the ones where everybody talks about it but no one does anything about it.
Several researchers have observed that successful organizations must exhibit a balance among staff, process, and technology. As far as I know, no one has been able to build an assessment tool to measure the extent to which that balance exists in the enterprise. Together with my long-time friend and colleague, Robert DeMichiell, we set about the task of building an assessment instrument that measures the project management balance in an organization with respect to the priority (and attention) it gives to staff, process (and here we mean project management process), and technology. We felt that the assessment instrument should establish the current state and desired state and give some insight into the strategies one might employ to achieve the desired state. The underlying model that we developed consists of 20 questions that are answered twice (once for the current state and once for the desired state). Each question poses three answers and the respondent is to weight the answers by distributing 10 points across the 3 responses according to their priority in describing the environment. The data can be graphically represented as shown in the figure below.
The triangle represents the three dimensions that determine project management balance: staff, process, technology. For the purposes of this assessment tool Staff refers to the project team., Process refers to the project management strategy that has been selected for the project, and Technology refers to the tools, templates, processes, hardware, and software that support the chosen project management process.
The triangle is divided into six non-overlapping zones. Each zone is named with a combination of the letters S, P, and T. Their ordering in the name gives us the ordering of their distances from each vertex with the closest vertex listed first. The assessment data is summarized along these three dimensions and represented in the form of a straight line with a square at one end (current state) and a diamond at the other (desired state). The distance of the end points of the line to the vertices of the triangle gives us a comparative measure of the priority of the given dimension to the organization. The closer the end point is to the vertex the higher the priority of the variable associated with that vertex. In this example, the location of the square tells us that the organization currently places a high degree of importance on Technology, less on Process, and least on Staff. In other words, the Technology infrastructure has been dictated. This determines the project management Process to be used and finally the project team is chosen to be compatible with the established Technology and Process infrastructure. The location of the diamond tells us that the desired project management culture is to have more or less equal importance placed on Process and Technology (Process has a bit higher priority than Technology) with the highest priority given to Staff. In other words, Staff for the project team is chosen first. They then determine the best project management strategy to be used for the project they are to be assigned to and finally they choose from among all available Technologies those that best support their choice of project management strategy.
The length of the line is directly proportional to the degree of organizational change that will be needed for the organization to reach its desired project management culture. As part of our research we expect to develop strategies to help the organization move from its current state to its desired state.
The primary benefits to the organization of a balanced project management culture are:
- to increase business value by improving project management practices,
- to create an effective project management environment,
- to empower staff to develop and align with project management processes, and
- to support project management with the appropriate technology.
The assessment instrument is quite robust and integrates well with continuous process improvement programs and project management maturity initiatives.
A first draft of an assessment instrument has been developed and preliminary validation studies undertaken. Much remains to be done however. If you, your colleagues, or students have an interest in furthering the instrument, please get in touch with me.
Robert K. Wysocki
President, EII
Editor, EII Publications |
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