Maturing the Project Capabilities in your Organization. Part 1: Establishing a Project Culture.

Businesses that can get good at delivering value through projects are likely to succeed. In today's world, with the pace of change in the marketplace, projects are a good strategy to quickly and effectively deliver the value you need to secure and sustain your customers. The better you are at delivering projects, the faster that value is delivered to market and the greater your competitiveness becomes. How can you ensure that your organization reaps these rewards? Follow these steps.

1. Call a Spade a Spade. 
Find, recognize, and call out your projects. In many organizations it can be easy for projects to slip into an operational rhythm. The people managing the projects are just doing their assigned work. The resources contributing to those projects just view the project as their day to day routine. Nobody notices when a project starts or ends. No one knows when a project is delivered. Sound familiar? 

A project is a discrete, time bound initiative that will deliver value to your organization. ​

Everything that has a beginning and an end date should be examined as to whether it should be called a project. In most cases it should. In addition to starting and stopping, it should be known why a project is starting, and what its outcome will be. If you know all of these things, the work should be called a project and will become part of your project revolution. 

2. Establish Project Roles. 
Team members who are contributing to the work you have now called projects should occupy known and understood roles. Fundamentally, there are three roles your organization needs to understand to authorize and execute projects effectively.

• Project Sponsor - this is the person who authorizes the project to begin and who holds the ultimate accountability for its success. Project sponsors can be positioned anywhere in your organization where they will have access to resources (people and money) and where they can have a good understanding of organizational strategy and the link between that and the project outcome. 
• Project Lead - this is the person will execute the project. They might hold the title "project manager" in a mature organization but to start, your organization may call them something else. This role leads the team of people who is accomplishing the project outcome and provides regular communication to the project sponsor about progress, challenges, and expenditures. 
• Project Team Member - this role is likely held by several people on any given project. However, it is important to call out every person who participates in the project, and for each project they participate in. This is because it is very common to otherwise have projects competing for the same resources which will limit the ability to effectively deliver project value. 

Know who occupies each role for each project. Look out for role overlaps and competing projects. Get these people together for each project. Help your project leads communicate with each other. Ensure that project sponsors are engaged and receiving regular reports about project progress. 

3. Deliver with Consistency.
Once you know who your project teams are, and what projects they are executing, you can look for common pain points that, once addressed, will accelerate team effectiveness. Since projects operate inside of your organization, each organization will have areas that create project constraints. Here are some ideas about common places to start creating consistency. 

• Project Initiation - start projects the same way each time. Project documentation should use a consistent format, and be provided to the appropriate roles. Project authorization should happen the same way no matter which sponsor is accountable. Supports a project will require should be in place before the project begins. Identify these and use a project initiation checklist to ensure they are consistently configured. Kick-off meetings can use a standardized agenda and team communication can follow a set routine. 
• Project Reporting - use a template that highlights key items relevant to all projects. 
• Project Closeout - end projects the same way each time. Centralize project documentation and use a checklist to set expectations around how projects are closed and documented. 

4. Embrace Feedback.
Establish and promote an open project culture. Ensure project leads and team members are empowered to escalate concerns to engaged sponsors or through other channels. Help project teams identify and disclose risks. Evaluate and mitigate these risks together. Conduct consistent project retrospectives and document lessons learned alongside other project closeout documentation. Ensure lessons learned have a pathway to effect action on future projects. 

5. Cultivate Expertise. 
Grow, develop, hire, acquire, consult with and sustain project expertise. The people who will execute your projects the best are people who understand your projects the best, and people who can align with project vision. Help project teams that work well together perform projects together often. Over time, these teams can establish ad hoc practices that lay a powerful foundation for your organization's next steps in project maturity. Invest in valuable project team members and leaders by supporting formal project knowledge acquisition. Celebrate project teams that succeed and reward effective project delivery. 

Creating a mature project organization takes time and effort but the rewards can be substantial. If the above steps seem like things your organization is already doing, watch for our posts on the next steps in project maturity for your organization including Processes and Playbooks. 

Establishing a Project Culture