The Layer-Cake of Corporate Culture
Corporate culture is never unified, no matter how small the organization. There are strata of culture and culture can shift from moment to moment based on context. Even in my companies - which have less than 10 employees each - the culture changes based on the circumstances.
I was reading Andrew Filev's Project Management 2.0 Blog this morning and was thoroughly enjoying it. He was both praising and providing critique towards Leisa Reichelt's Collaborative Project Management work.
Andrew says:
Leisa seems to overlook the core element of the new-generation project management – collaboration. “Social” is the main word here. Projects now tend to be managed with the help of the wisdom of the many.
This is very true. New project management techniques are very social and collaborative. However, I wouldn't say "now tend to be" because this implies that our field of agile project management is the norm or that its pervasive throughout organizations.
If only it were so.
Most organizations today have some lean, some agile and a lot of traditional management thinking. Cost accounting, business accounting, expense rules, HR policies, and information flows are far from agile in all but a statistically insignificant number of companies.
Combine this with the fact that most people are either trained in traditional hierarchical management or (more often the case) not trained as managers at all - and we get multiple subcultures spread across an organization.
If you have a team to manage and that team is fairly isolated, you can build a good collaborative inner structure. But your team is still part of the rest of the company. That means you have to build an agile-to-hierarchic interface to relate what you are doing in terms the rest of the organization can process.
That interface comes with overhead. That interface requires internal policies to map to (at least to an extent) external policies. Your collaborative environment needs to make sense to the command and control people who give you work and funding.
Workflow then becomes the next issue. How do you maintain an reasonable level of work-in-process (traditional management tends to dump work on you)?
How do you communicate value back up the external chain-of-command?
One sad fact about most implementations of collaborative management is that they don't respect the fact that the rest of the company exists. Value is created within the team that has no mechanism to be communicated up the chain. That value is then undervalued at funding time. It is squandered.
The team cannot find the words to communicate value. The creation of the team's collaborative processes didn't include robust enough reporting mechanisms to achieve this communication.
Meanwhile, an underperforming waterfall team on the next floor has received more funding because their culture more directly maps to the rest of the org.
Collaborative tools and processes can certainly help teams perform better. We've seen group performance increases that have truly been stunning with no change in staff. But in order for the change to be sustainable and in order for the organization to understand the value - other cultures than the teams must be accounted for.
When this happens, something wonderful happens. The change isn't threatening to the organization, the benefits are noted, they spread virally, and true systemic change can occur.
Great comment. You are right that it will take some time for the organizational culture to change on a broad scale.
I think we are at the beginning of the phase when "early majority" starts to put collaboration in action (however we call it –"agile project management", "Project Management 2.0", "social project management", "wikinomics", etc.). Some collaboration tools/practices, like blogs, are already way deep in the adoption by "early majority". Some industries are also further into this road than the other ones. This means that we are close to the explosive adoption of agile project management practices.
By the way, I'm consciously using the technology adoption model though we are speaking about organizational changes here, because the technology changes in this case indicate the changes in the culture.
Posted by: Andrew Filev | 07 July 2008 at 19:09