Our competency development program helps senior project staff become transformation leaders
The program is many elements, a little training, lots of peer learning, an assesment framework embeded into a procedural tool. The tool helps participants assess where they are on their development journey and where they want to be. The development process uses peer -assisted learning over a 90day time-frame. You undertake shared assignment challenges in a virtual space that simulates the journey for delivering change into politically rich business contexts. You learn from each other.
The Current Shortfall
Projects are an organisation’s response to opportunity or threat. Responding well benefits from the coordinated contributions of people in many roles.
Classically Project Managers are asked to create a project after a threat or opportunity triggering change has started the organisation’s people thinking. The PM’s typical project end is when a ‘technical solution’ has been created or acquired. All a long way short of responding in a VUCA world.
Mostly the legacy of projects as part of engineering. A useful view point for several millenia – when things may have been Stable Certain Simple Clear (SCSC) but less so for the last 5 or less decades.
Now it is a view point that in any Volatile Uncertain Complex Ambiguous (VUCA) environment is well short of one that reliably delivers benefit.
The legacy definition of project manager simply supervises the incurring of costs.
The view of project as “creates a defined output to cost, time and scope” is a very limited, often insufficient view. Great if you are a supplier delivering to a contract so you can invoice when the delivery occurs. A long way short when your an organisation looking to thrive from change or even just to survive nonnegotiable change.
At the least project managers in customer side roles should realise the role’s full definition is “to deliver the steady state benefit that balances Run the Organisation versus Change the Organisation” (#lmlcto)
Delivering Beneficial Change
When we want an holistic approach then Complex Adaptive Systems and leadership insight as explored by either agile or program management frameworks, tools and techniques is needed. Both say roughly the same thing: Initiatives often grow slowly from hard to spot beginnings or arrives with an unprepared-for bang that results from the unforeseeable alignment of multiple factors. The end need is the benefit. Steady state benefit means delivering culture (behaviours) as well as technical outputs. For best results the whole solution must be nurtured from before ‘project delivery’ of outputs to eventually form the habits of new operational every-day cycles through the whole value-chain from suppliers to customers and regulators and wider.
Being equal to these challenges needs what we call Transformational Leaders.
Transformational Leaders
T-Ls may have project management skill-sets in their tool-bag (they may be PMP and PRINCE2 qualified) but to succeed in the TL role they have a quiet different skill-set that includes wide cross-organisation networks – either today or they are focused on creating and extending their reach. They inspire and empower others to get engaged, embrace or define direction, apply enthusiasm and deliver in specific domains. When success is delivered it is because the TL has helped people connect and define problem, design solution, mobilise actions and opinions – not because the TL did all the communicating but because they enabled everyone else to communicate.
The ‘next-step’ for competent project managers IS NOT ‘more of the same but bigger’.
Capability Development Framework
Our capability development framework helps measure candidate future TL’s As-Is and To-Be profiles – with awareness that people’s desires, strengths, interests and needs are all different – helps the organisation plot a development path that builds the networked community of change agents whose reach is into organisation at all levels. We also provide guidance on how to measures the organisation’s backlog or assignments that the TLs will deliver, also create a collaborative context for future TLs to grow each other’s skill-sets by sharing the journey and sharing their evolving capability with the organisation’s project and operational communities.
Organisations that need TLs to succeed need them forging a network that crosses hierarchy, spreads outside the organisation and embraces many contributors and view points and that’s a different development philosophy from ‘go on a three or five day training class’.
Our Support to Your Development Efforts?
We’d love to help your people down the path, give them the tools, for example to help the board express vision linked to the profit and loss account and cultural mission and values; show them techniques that socialise, share and embrace the coming change (nemawashi). Run the simulations which enable profit-centre and change owners engage in steering and governance cycles with greater confidence and capability from greater familiarity and challenge.
Contact us now to find out more Capability@LogicalModel.Net