Why not use organization development (OD) approaches to support projects? That was the question of my initial text on OD elements in projects in which I’ve touched on a required compass, a way of working, enablement of individuals and teams, decision making rules and information flows.
In this post, I will share some thoughts on Culture Development and Personal Development. When I started thinking about it, these were aspects of OD, which I thought would not be easily transferrable from line organizations to projects.
But when giving it a bit more consideration, this initial evaluation might not even be true. Hence, you might want to see this as a continuation of my last text.
Let's dive into it:
Culture Development
In projects you barely get to actively shape a culture. When a project is pre-dominantly run in a fixed organization huge parts of the organization’s culture will also show in the project culture. On top the project culture will be influenced by the cultures other members of the project organization bring into it. Visible stakeholders will act as role models influencing the project culture – independent of whether they intend to do so. As do external project members, which is why a cultural fit might be an underestimated criterion during selection of project partners.
Experience shows, that it is possible to positively influence a project culture as external consultants – even if you do not have the official mandate to develop culture. I have witnessed multiple times how bpExperts’ open-minded, action-oriented, and communication-based culture has washed into project organizations, influencing other actors.
On top of role models, small activities can help to formalize parts of a project culture. For example, project team workshops on ground rules or on sharing and agreeing on preferred ways of communication and collaboration will be helpful.
For ground rules, communication and collaboration alignments the company’s values could be a starting point. Why not discuss how the values would reflect in daily project work and which rules to be deducted from that? That would anchor the value in the project work and would probably allow internal project members to feel “at home”. It might improve their confidence in otherwise unknown project environments.
Personal Development
The limited time horizon and the tremendous pressure to deliver results are certainly playing against extensive personal development as part of projects. In addition, leading roles in projects typically do not have development of people set as their priority. I would even bet, that they do not even see it as their responsibility at all.
Nonetheless, there is a link you can't deny: Many line managers use the participation in projects as development measures for their employees.
Projects provide the opportunity to work in a different role, to pick-up a lot of new knowledge, to build a network in the company, to interact with a variety of people with different backgrounds, to learn about yourself and your ability to cope with time pressure and often uncertainty. So much development potential!
It is great, that line managers try to utilize projects for personal development. However, it won’t work without the employees. Unfortunately, from my experience, the employees do not really feel responsible for their own development or do not see, that projects provide them the chance for development.
To maximize the effect making the development potentials more explicit can be helpful. It can be as easy as sitting with your superior, mentor, coach or colleague before a project reflecting on what you could and want to learn in a specific project. Occasionally review it and remind yourself on your individual targets.
OD in projects and change facilitation
OD elements in projects naturally focus on the involved individuals in the project organization. Saying this, it is obvious, how OD in projects is different from classic change management. In classic change management, the focus lies on the affected individuals.
My thoughts on OD in projects are directed towards taking care of the anyways actively involved stakeholders. Enabling and empowering them will also help with the Change Facilitation, though. The project team is a key multiplier due to their many touchpoints with affected individuals throughout the project duration.
bpExperts has developed a Business Readiness concept integrated into a process-driven ERP implementation approach. This concept efficiently combines both project organization development and change facilitation in a holistic way.
Looking forward to hear about your ideas and experiences on Organization Development in projects!
As you might have noted, I’ve switched from using “change management” to “change facilitation” in the last paragraph. A decisive difference for several reasons… I might share some thoughts another time.