Assessing Environmental Challenges

When you try to understand an environment, you must consider many types of influences, drivers, and constraints. Typically, an environment is a complex ecosystem that requires understanding and the balancing of many internal and external challenges such as these:

• Business environment

  • Economic

  • Legal

  • Regulatory

• Corporate culture: internal challenges

• Internal governance: process and procedure challenges

• People challenges

• Technology challenges

Organizations that overcome these challenges derive better results for their business through higher solution and service quality, improved customer satisfaction, and working environments that attract the best people in the industry. These factors translate into a positive impact on bottom lines and improvements in an organization's strategic effectiveness.

Business Environment

Projects must operate in an ever-changing business environment that has a complex relationship between legal, regulatory, and economic influences. Rates of change in both business and technology are accelerating, including shorter product cycles, increasingly diverse and complex solutions and services, and evolving business models. Most managers know all too well that increasingly they are expected to do more with less. They are also faced with rapidly changing external requirements (e.g., regulations and legislation such as Sarbanes-Oxley [SOX]).

Often, project teams are caught between opposing external forces. For example, consumers' demands for features are growing while their demands for reliable, simplified and secure operations are growing, too. Organizations are now faced with rising competitive pressures just to keep up. Add to all of that pressures of internationalization and globalization. In short, demands and pressures just from a business environment require that a project team have nimble and agile solution delivery processes.

Corporate Culture

An important component to understanding a delivery environment is assessing where both a project team and the organization lie in the solutions delivery landscape. This landscape is a multivariable cultural assessment of an organization. Corporate cultures and behaviors range from being slow to adopt new technology to the other end of the spectrum where a project team or organization leads a market through innovation and adopting new technology and new thinkinga mature, learning organization. Figure 2-1 categorizes these cultures and behaviors into eight regions on a continuum.

Figure 2-1. Continuum of corporate cultures and behaviors

Frozen in the Past

The path that leads up and over the abyss in Figure 2-1 indicates a safe and well-tread path. Organizations that follow this path are slow to change and adopt new technology and new thinking; usually they wait for innovation to be proved out in industry. They are tactically focused and cost driven. This position is not necessarily bad because it helps organizations avoid pitfalls experienced by less careful organizations. However, these organizations often have a burdensome bureaucracy.

The Abyss

When an organization tries to use new technology or new thinking but is not quite ready to adopt it, it often heads down the path leading into the abyssa path where instead of advancing the project or organization, the organization ends up hurting itself. This organization is starting a death spiral into the abyss. The abyss is a place where teams spend more time, energy, and money on tools and fixing processes rather than on solutions delivery. Organizations sliding into the abyss realize rising costs, rising complexity, and ineffective delivery. Although few organizations avoid the abyss, how deep they fall into the abyss usually depends on how soon they make their culture work for them rather than the other way around. Nevertheless, what do organizations do to avoid or climb out of the abyss? They figure out how to deliver solutions effectively within their culture (sometimes in spite of it) while meeting ongoing business needs.

Potential

Organizations with positive momentum coming out of the abyss are following the path that leads upward to where the organization makes progress incrementally in maturing its solutions delivery. It finds ways to simplify and reduce complexity, adopts a strategic focus (i.e., becomes proactive instead of reactive), focuses on value as opposed to cost, and learns how to become nimble and able to change quickly. Through hard-won maturity, these organizations become competitive.

Leader

As an organization continues to be competitive and continues to mature, it moves ahead of the competition by following the path that leads onward and upward. With continued success, such an organization is rewarded with a leading position in a market.

Internal Governance: Process and Procedure Challenges

Business sponsors are often frustrated by the amount of time and resources it takes to deliver solutions. Although technology challenges are increasing, experience has shown that most of the internal challenges are related to people, processes, tools, and procedures. If an organization is fortunate, it has processes, procedures, and tools that match how it wants to run itself. More typically, organizations use entrenched legacy processes, procedures, and tools that can be characterized in the following ways:

• Are inflexible to change

• Provide low return on investment of time and effort

• Hinder teams' progress rather than enabling it

• Underserve project team needs

• Are ill-suited to the task at hand

People Challenges

Unlike other challenges, people challenges are more oriented around softer skillswhich tend to be less tangible and harder to manage. People challenges often include dealing with team morale, internal politics, and the like. Additional common people challenges include these:

• Skills

• Team chemistry

• Organizational structure

Skills

One of the hardest challenges is to assess team member skills properly, and then blend them so that a team is technically complementary and has redundancy in critical skills. As discussed later, MSF attempts to address this challenge through its Readiness Management Discipline.

Team Chemistry

A challenge often overlooked is team chemistry. Not only does a team need to make sure they are technically and functionally complementary, they also need to make sure they have complementary personalities and traitspart of the set of natural built-in checks and balances. For example, if a team has a hard-charging person that is very good at working through problems, that person often needs to be paired with a more detail-oriented person who can ensure quality and completeness. Without this balance, a team is at risk.

Organizational Structure

As discussed later, most organizations have an organizational structure (e.g., hierarchical) that rarely enables high-performance teams. Organizations often underestimate how hard it is to run a business one way and run a project another. For instance, if team members are accustomed to working in a hierarchical organization, it is difficult for them to change suddenly to a more empowering organizational structure. But beware of the old adage: "Be careful what you wish for...." People want to be empowered, but when it becomes a reality, they often feel "lost" and feel as if they are "aimlessly wandering" around a project until they internalize empowerment and start leading themselves.

Another side effect of becoming an empowered team is that executives, who are accustomed to a hierarchical model of doing business, sometimes realize they have an inadequate understanding of what it takes to deliver solutions in an empowered structure.

Technology Challenges

As technology evolves, so do technology challenges. Technology challenges manifest themselves in many ways that arise from all aspects of delivering a solution, including needing more skilled resources and more dynamic tools that must work across more diverse environments. Added to this is the pressure to increase qualities of service (e.g., availability, scalability, and maintainability). These challenges present potential for an organization to spiral into a technology black hole. Without careful governance, costs and schedules can quickly get out of control. To mitigate these occurrences, organizations should have a solution road map as well as an understanding of how to take advantage of new technology to provide increasing return on investment.