Abstract
Enterprise Wide (EW) projects are strategic in nature and bring transformation and change to organizations. Since the inception of the Project Management Institute in 1969, and the first release of A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide) in 1996, PMI standards have matured and are widely adopted by organizations globally to manage projects. Today, numerous tools and technologies are available to effectively manage projects including project scope, time, and cost. EW projects require not only good project management skills but also need good leadership skills to lead teams towards project success. Project leaders need to understand project goals and objectives and its alignment towards an organization's growth and strategy. This paper shifts the traditional paradigm of project manager to project leader to manage and lead projects successfully. The author discusses unique characteristics of EW projects, its alignment towards PMI knowledge areas, and leadership skills required to lead EW projects successfully. Further, the author groups PMI-recommended leadership skills into four categories and explains how these categories of leadership are important to lead EW projects. Finally, the author recommends two project planning models for organizations to use for planning and delivering EW projects successfully.
Introduction
Enterprise Wide (EW) projects bring transformation and change to organizations. Most of the EW projects are large initiatives to meet strategic needs of an organization. Typical EW projects span across multiple business units, are implemented across multi-sites, and the project teams are distributed globally. EW projects are used to enable new business models, to improve operational excellence, and to focus on growth and productivity of an organization. Project and program managers focus on traditional ways of managing triple constraints to monitor and control project success. However, research shows strategic initiatives that bring changes to organizations have high failure rates due to poor project performance. The key factors for strategic initiative failures are attributed to leadership and communication. This paper shifts the focus from managing projects to leading projects to improve overall EW project success.
This paper is organized into four sections. The first section discusses characteristics of EW projects and its relevance to PMI knowledge areas. The second section discusses the importance of leadership in EW project's success. The third section discusses the need for leading projects and its relevance to PMBOK® Guide recommendations. The final section discusses two types of project planning models to plan and execute EW projects.
The topics discussed in this paper are relevant to information technology projects. However, the concepts and discussions are applicable to any type of industry that is strategic in nature, has enterprise wide impact, deals with a large number of stakeholders, and manages globally distributed teams.
Characteristics of Enterprise Wide Projects
Organizations depend on projects to implement various initiatives. The initiatives may fall under short-term to long-term, easy to complex, tactical to strategic. While discussing failures across the process knowledge spectrum, Edmondson & Schein(2012) classifies operations into three types:
- Routine operations, where the failures are low and predictable. Examples in this category include high-volume manufacturing, fast food operations, etc.;
- Complex operations, where uncertainty and risks are really high. Industries like custom manufacturing and software development will fall under this category; and
- Innovation operations, where teams will experience a high level of learning as well as failures. Industries like new manufacturing process, pharmaceutical research, etc., will fall under this category.
As shown in Figure 1, EW projects will overlap between complex and innovation operations. EW projects face high levels of unknown-unknowns, and high levels of risks in meeting the project goals. In addition, EW projects are strategic initiatives to organizations, and any failure has a high impact to the organization's profit and growth. The following sections will discuss the EW characteristics in detail, and its relevance to PMI knowledge areas.
Figure 1: Enterprise Wide Projects
Alignment towards PMI Knowledge Areas
The PMBOK® Guide—Fifth Edition has ten knowledge areas. The following section focuses on PMI knowledge areas and its relevance to EW projects.
Stakeholder Management is one of the knowledge areas added in the PMBOK® Guide—Fifth Edition. Since EW projects deal with multiple sites, multiple business units, and global teams, stakeholder management is the key area every project leader should pay attention to throughout the lifecycle of the project. Assudani & Kloppenborg (2010) suggest that identifying key stakeholders, prioritizing them, and maintaining productive working relationships is a key to project success. For EW projects, identifying a complete list of stakeholders in the planning stage is extremely challenging and time consuming. Due to the complexity of EW projects, project managers identify new scope items during project execution, which were missed out at the planning stage. When new scope items are associated with new stakeholders, project leaders have less time to establish relationships with them, or identify their expectations and involvement in project delivery and success. Specifically, identifying new stakeholders in the latter stage of the project lifecycle will jeopardize project success.
Risk Management is one of the key areas project managers should focus on throughout all stages of the project lifecycle. EW projects have a high level of unknown-unknowns. These risks may pop up at any stage of the project phase. Risk management processes should focus on minimizing the impact and maximizing opportunities to improve project success. EW project leaders should include stakeholders in the risk management process; establish trust by creating awareness and clarifying expectations on project risks. This will help the project team to collaborate well with stakeholders to manage risks better and to deliver projects successfully (Didraga, 2013). In addition, EW risks should be categorized and managed closely, based upon priority, location, and impact to overall project success.
The Quality Management process and its outcome are directly related to customer satisfaction and project success. Since EW projects span across multiple internal and external teams, it is important to have consistent standards and best practices for the teams to understand and follow to deliver quality output. Multiple teams and business units within an organization may have their own way of delivering projects using their localized standards. It is important to identify and agree upon common standards and best practices which could be used by all the teams associated with project delivery. This includes process standards, development and documentation standards, testing standards, etc. The second step is creating awareness and proper training to adopt the standard for consistent project delivery. In addition, these standards should be published and available for everyone to access from a common repository. The third step is monitoring and controlling to ensure that the teams are actually adopting the standards. The final step is generating metrics and reporting to identify any exceptions or deviations from standards to take corrective action or to improve future releases.
Organizations depend on knowledge workers to deliver projects. Most of the EW projects are global in nature and knowledge workers and resources are geographically distributed. Human Resources Management has an important role to play in EW project success. Specifically, Human Resources Management is challenging for projects with a matrix reporting structure, distributed teams as well as culturally diverse teams. Typical EW projects consist of dynamic teams, and project leaders need to manage the teams with or without authority. The teams needs to be motivated and influenced to work toward common project goals and objectives. Project leaders play a key role in influencing and motivating the teams to get the desired results. Leadership skills play a key role and this will be discussed in a later section of this paper.
Procurement Management and vendor management are important to EW projects and have very high dependence to project scope, time, and cost. Many large organizations have separate departments specializing in vendor selection, procurement, negotiation, legal, and contract management. The EW project manager needs to work with vendor management teams and the actual vendor representatives to ensure that project goals are conveyed to the vendors and they are included as a part of the extended teams to manage schedule, cost, standards, and compliance.
Project management has matured well with multiple tools and technologies to manage project scope, time, and cost. Scope Management, Time Management, and Cost Management are called triple constraints for projects, and project managers are good at managing these constraints, which have a direct impact to project delivery. However, EW projects have higher risks of failure due to additional scope identification at a later stage of the project, which may challenge planned time and cost. Due to longer duration of EW projects, cost may fluctuate high or low depending upon the nature of the project task and its association with the cost factor. In addition, EW projects are challenged by various external factors including changes in organization structure, changes in marketplace, and changes in stakeholders.
Factors Affecting Enterprise Wide Projects
One of the recent studies done by PMI highlights the grave nature of strategic initiatives failure and the results show that 48 percent of the projects fail due to poor project performance. This study also states that for every US$1 billion spent on a strategic initiative, US$149 million is lost due to poor project performance. In the rapidly changing global marketplace, organizations are finding efficient ways to deliver more value to customers with less resources and low cost. Organizations are looking for ways to improve project success by identifying root causes of project failures. As shown in Figure 2, the PMI study reveals that communication and leadership are two causes for the failures. The first major cause was due to insufficient communications (59 percent) and the second major cause was due to lack of leadership (56 percent) (Cabrey and Haughey, 2014). The following section will focus on essential leadership skills required to lead EW projects and ways of applying leadership skills to improve project success.
Figure 2: Organizational Change Failure
Leading Enterprise Wide Projects
For the last 25 years, project management has evolved and matured, with multiple organizations and countries adopting PMI standards to deliver projects. Many tools and technologies are available in the marketplace to manage projects globally. Leveraging tools and technologies helps project managers manage projects better; however, project managers lack soft skills to manage project teams and stakeholders. EW projects need project leaders to understand demanding market needs, align project goals with the organization's overall strategy, motivate and communicate effectively with geographically distributed teams, and focus on customer satisfaction. The following sections will highlight essential leadership skills to manage EW projects and shift focus from managing to leading projects.
There are many books and research articles that analyze and discuss leadership. The concept of leadership has evolved and changed over the years and there is no easy way to define successful leadership. Many large organizations have moved away from command and control to collaboration type of leadership and there is no single type of leadership trait available to define successful leaders. Leaders make decisions for a situation based on information, knowledge, and wisdom. Since strategic decisions bring change and transformation to organizations, any decision made will have a direct impact on the organization's profitability, growth, and success. Leadership success depends on how individual decisions and their outcome impact overall success of the organization, stakeholders, and society.
Project leaders make decisions everyday based on the situation, and their decisions will have a direct impact to project delivery and its stakeholders. Turner and Müller (2004) states that many research articles ignored the importance of leadership style and competence and its contribution to project success. Authors have discussed having different leadership styles to manage different project lifecycles, having specific leadership styles to manage multi-cultural projects, and managing projects using task-oriented vs. people-oriented leadership styles. However, there is no specific set of traits recommended to manage lead EW projects successfully. As shown in Figure 3, this paper will focus on ten leadership skills recommended by PMBOK® Guide—Fifth Edition and its relevance to EW projects. The author groups ten leadership skills into four categories and discusses how project leaders leverage these leadership skills to improve EW project success.
Figure 3. Global Project Leader
The first category is focusing on the individual as a project leader. The second category is focusing on team leadership and building a better team to deliver successful projects. The third category is focusing on communication leadership and how to communicate effectively to various project stakeholders. The final category is focusing on decision making.
Trusted Leader
Due to the complex nature of EW projects, project leaders deal with a wide variety of multi-cultural, globally distributed stakeholders and cross-functional teams. All project stakeholders should feel comfortable with the project leader and should consider him or her as a trusted leader for communication and collaboration to deal with every interaction related to project tasks. Successful project leaders negotiate with other parties to create a win-win situation, and also manage conflicts better to ensure project and organizations goals are met. Some of the strategies project managers could follow are empowering team members to work towards project goals, collaborating with stakeholders to translate project goals, and its alignment and value for the organization. In addition to monitoring, the project manager should also help team members to resolve issues and act as a leader and facilitator to achieve project objectives.
Team Building
Since EW project teams are well diversified and span across multiple business units, building diverse teams together is one of the most challenging tasks for the project leader. This includes picking the right mix of skills and resources to deliver a project, accelerating team building activities at the initial stages of the project, and making the team work together to meet project goals and objectives. Diverse team members should feel as one team, should realize their value and contribution to the project, and should realize how their work translates into project success. Project leaders should identify the team's strength and weakness and provide appropriate coaching to augment the needs and skills required to deliver projects successfully. Project leaders should also organize appropriate team-building activities to build a better performing team in a short term, without impacting the project timeline. The team should understand how their work contributes to project success, and how the project outcome translates into profit, growth, and the overall success of the organization.
Communication
Communication management is the essential and key factor affecting EW project success. Due to the large number of stakeholders and geographic distribution, communication management is a big challenge for EW project managers. It involves planning communication-related activities, distributing project information to stakeholders, and following a consistent communication strategy throughout the project lifecycle. To ensure project success, project managers should keep up periodic and frequent communication with management, team members, customers, and other stakeholders (Dow & Taylor, 2008). Anantatmula (2010) conducted a study to find enablers and barriers of project performance and found that communication is one of the people-related factors affecting project performance. He further insisted that project managers should manage customer expectations by clearly defining project outcomes and communicating it to all of the related stakeholders. A case study conducted by Gökşen et al. (2009) also iterated that understanding customers by establishing good communication is a crucial step to ensure project success. Project leaders should create a good communication strategy, which includes mode and frequency of communication to stakeholders. Project communication should be consistent and the content should be customized and localized to meet different needs of the stakeholders including a global team's cultural and language needs. The content should be free from any technical or project related jargon to help everyone understand the content and act upon it.
Decision Making
EW project leaders make decisions everyday on project challenges, risks, and issues. These decisions have a direct or indirect impact on successful project delivery. Project leaders should have a consistent process to collect right and relevant information and apply project knowledge, past experience, and wisdom to make the right decision for the project's success. Instead of just looking at the narrow focus on the issue, project leaders should analyze how the decisions made will have wider impact to the project, organization, and stakeholders. EW project success will bring high visibility and career growth for project leaders. However, decisions made should not be influenced by personal preferences or prejudices. Project leader should always look at the lessons learned from the previous projects to make better decisions by leveraging best practices adopted from related projects or similar projects to ensure the mistakes are not repeated in making decisions.
Project Planning Models
Project planning is an important phase in any project and better planning will lead to project success. Since EW projects have wider impacts and different priorities and objectives, project leaders should adopt a good planning model to implement EW projects. The following section discusses two project planning models that could be used to improve EW projects. Risk-based planning models and outcome-based planning models are two strategies organizations can adopt to improve EW project success.
A risk-based planning model focuses on identifying overall project scope and grouping the project deliverables based on risks. As shown in Figure 4, this model primarily focuses on reducing project risks and increasing the learning and experience of the project teams to deliver predictable results in future phases.
Figure 4: Risk-Based Project Planning
This model categorizes risks into low, medium, and high, based on scope, cost, and time. Once the scope is categorized, divide the project scope into multiple phases by selecting low risk scope items first and high risk items last. Some of the advantages of this planning model are:
Helps to identify unknown-unknown risks early
Some of the disadvantages of this model are:
An outcome-based planning model focuses on customer needs and priorities by grouping overall project deliverables based on customer priorities. As shown in Figure 5, this model carries high levels of risks and costs and the outcome is uncertain. However, the project leader focuses on improving project success by bringing in highly skilled resources and managing risks closely by using the right resources to deliver high-risk projects.
Figure 5: Outcome-Based Planning Model
The deliverables are categorized as low, medium, and high, and staggers overall project delivery into multiple phases. High priority items will be delivered first, and low priority items will be delivered last. Some of the advantages of this planning model are:
Some of the disadvantages of this model are:
Conclusion
EW projects are strategic in nature and bring transformation and change to organizations. Project management is highly matured and a large number of certified project managers are available globally to manage projects using various proven methods, tools, and technologies to deliver projects successfully. However, EW projects need good project leaders who can understand the big picture of the project goals and its relevance to an organization's growth and strategy. This paper shifts the focus from project manager to project leader to lead and manage EW projects. The author categorizes ten leadership skills into four categories and discusses how these categories of leadership will help to lead EW projects. Finally, the author recommends two project planning models which could be used to plan and deliver EW projects.
