MANAGEMENT YOGI: Organizational Project Management

Showing posts with label Organizational Project Management. Show all posts

Thursday, January 23, 2020

PMP Protein: Changing Work Cultures and Organizational Impact

By K Suresh, PMP

In this article, we will see how changing work culture can hurt an organization’s productivity, profits and sustainable growth.

With a new set of workers, an organization also brings new cultural aspects, which will impact the organizational culture.

While I have had experiences in power and construction industry, these challenges are also being felt in other industries as well.

Changing Work Culture
Let me outline some areas and inform how the organizational culture is impacted by a variety of causes related to new generation of workers.

Cause #1: Lack of awareness of work place ethics among the Gen – Y and the Millennials (the fourth-generation employees)
Since childhood, the younger generations – predominantly Gen-Y and the millennials - were brought up with:

High comfort levels,
Marks oriented education without proper maturity on human values,
Lack of beliefs,
Lack of respect for an individual,
Poor understanding of work place ethics,
No ground rules, and
Inability to face practical challenges in versatile environments.

With these, teams formed by the fourth-generation employees are becoming prey to their own shortfalls in work places. On the other hand, organizations are facing challenges in rendering basic intensive training to re-orient the teams and increase work engagement.

Cause # 2: High Diplomacy by Top Management
The executives in top management are concentrating less on the understanding levels of junior executives by maintaining high diplomacy. Because the senior executives have the positive assumptions that junior executives are aware of work place ethics, have good behavior and attitude, and go with analytical planning approaches related to work execution. In core industries, other than software industry, more physical efforts to be exerted with patience at junior working levels. This needs to improved. However, I do agree that the new generation of workers are having good soft skills.

I would like to mention this diplomacy is costing billions of dollars in losses to the organizations and it’s losing sustainability goals of the organization in the global markets.

While optimum diplomacy is mandatory to empower teams, a high diplomatic approach based on flawed assumptions will not produce the needed results.

Cause # 3: Generation Gaps
If we can classify the graduates into by grouping them in decades, the below ones will be the comparison of capabilities for majorities of active employees. Do note that it’s a rough estimate.

Decade of 1980-1990: IQ > 50%, EQ < 50%
Decade of 1990-2000: IQ = 50%, EQ = 50%
Decade of 2000-2010: IQ < 50%. EQ > 50%
(IQ – Intelligence Quotient, EQ – Emotional Quotient)

This shows a downward trend for the attitudes and behaviors of the team members, which is also compounded by the effect of degrading quality of academic educational standards.

Cause # 4: Reduced Physical Working Capacity
The changing food habits and the degraded food quality due to mechanized foods - instead of natural products - are the inhibiting factors for the decreased physical capacities. Reduced physical work capability can’t be compensated by good soft skills.

This leads to stress in team members while executing their works. It becomes worse when team members are asked to work in environments that require a great deal of physical movements.

Cause # 5: Employee Expectations
The younger generations, such as the late Gen-Y and the millennials, are smart working in nature. But smart work is no replacement for hard work. Both have to be together.

The new generation of workers are sharp in grasping basic fundamentals, but feel saturated that they have learnt the maximum if they cover the basics! And nothing innovative needed to done further. Also, in few years they start looking for managerial roles instead of being engaged in their roles and responsibilities, for which they have been recruited.

Cause # 6: Capabilities for Construction Industry
Working conditions in construction industries are obviously tough due to many factors such as:

Versatile climates,
Working cultures,
Handling large teams,
Long working hours.

Hence leaders with high emotional intelligences (or EI) are required to achieve the results and meet the milestones. In other words, high working capacities and capabilities are desired to achieve successful project results. But the capacity to work hard and capability to perform is lacking in the fourth generation of workers.

Impact - Employer Challenges
All the above causes are leading to various limitations, which in turn leave the founders, and investors of the organization at stake with unsustainable business in global markets. Big corporate organizations, which are operating with diversified portfolios are also in the danger of extinction.

My guess is that if the trend continues, then these organizations will cease to exist in next 10 to 15 Years.

Scope for Improvement
Though there are many problems with the changing work cultures, there are also scope for improvements, some of which I’ve noted below.

Improvement #1: Basic grooming of children by parents
Positive grooming of children is necessary with respect to behavior, awareness of critical situations and challenges to face in personal and professional lives. They should be taught the value of patience, value of critical thinking and increased ability in analysis, etc. We as parents should not be limiting children to high comforts and more CGPA in academics.

Improvement #2: Educational institutions to improve students on behavioral aspects
In India, we can implement the South Korean concept of minimum 1 to 2 years of work in the defense sector or in short service commission. This will be an eligibility criteria for organizational (human resource) recruitment. This will also improve employee behavior.

Improvement #3: Following global standards
There can be stringent process approach implementation in organizations by maintaining global standards leading to evolutionary reformation. This can maintain sustainable business in the long-term.

Improvement #4: Change in organizational orientation
To remain in the longer term and be effective, organizations need to build leaders who aspire to achieve excellence in business instead of business excellence models for branding. While brand is important, more important is to actually achieve business excellence.

Improvement #5: Corporate governance
Organizations need to take period surveys to have a complete depiction of working cultures and improvements by employing effective leaders within the functional and administrative levels. Effective implementation can be started off by Periodic Dip Stick Surveys.

As I work in Indian industries, I ask these two questions (only from an organization perspective) to my colleagues and fellow professionals. I find these questions yet to be properly answered.

Question – 1: If the organization is being driven in a misleading direction, who will take an initiative to re-orient and how it will be done?

Question – 2: If the human resource (HR) department takes short-cuts while recruiting, who will be responsible for the reduced standard in working cultures?

I welcome your suggestions and ideas on these two questions.

Conclusion
Organizational have changed from people driven approaches to process driven approaches and finally are stepping into the principle driven approaches for sustainability in global markets.

Every Individual will have flashes of brilliance and ideas, but taking a lead in re-aligning the mismatches in actual facts and combining the same with actual implementation is important. Because organizations are now becoming outcome oriented on a vector scale to survive in high competition of the global market.

Brief Profile
K.Suresh
Manager – Projects, Adani Raipur Energen Ltd (formerly GMR Chhattisgarh Energy Ltd). I can be reached at: suresh.kotta1978@gmail.com.

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Wednesday, April 17, 2019

PMP Protein: Ensuring Effective Communication by Team Members and Middle Management

By Suresh K, PMP

Communication should both be effective and efficient. In any organization, a bulk of communication happen among team members and middle management. There are many areas that can be improved to have effective communication for team members and middle management in order to meet organizational objectives.

In this article, I’ll focus on few such areas where improvement can happen.

1# Introvertedness
In any organization, there will be introverts, extroverts as well as ambiverts. However, it’s more complicated for introverts to process interactions and events. Introverts carefully attend to their internal thoughts and feelings at the same time.

If the reporting supervisor of the team member is an extrovert, he or she may feel the communication gap when quick, spontaneous and confident decision-making is required by an introvert team member. If the reporting supervisor is an introvert, then the impact on productivity will be greater. In such cases, the team members should report to higher authorities in skip level meetings which are conducted periodically within the organization.

It doesn’t mean being introvert is bad, however, improvement is necessary.

2# Pre-determined mindset
A pre-determined mindset affects communication. Minimizing or avoiding predetermined mindset tends to increase internal communication encompassing both official and unofficial channels. This will also help the team members deliver effectively and productively.

With a pre-determined mindset, either the line manager’s or team member’s communication becomes one-sided. This should be avoided, because communication is never one-sided. Also, the process of communication involves more than just words and communication is mostly nonverbal in nature.

While communicating, team members and middle management need to have presence of mind, too. Internal communication should be an optimistic approach to keep everyone informed and have a climate of openness, which leads to an increase in productivity.

3# Listening Skills
Listening involves interpretation and spontaneous analysis of manager work and/or administrative instructions. Listening requires proper feedback by team members in-line with the work targets.

Immediate supervisors are also equally responsible to practice listening while getting team members’ valuable work inputs and ideas. This keeps team members motivated with proactive approach leading to increased productivity.

Autocratic managers, on the other hand, many times communicate in one direction. They need to ensure more bidirectional communication, one-on-one meetings with team members and improvement in listening skills.

4# Wearing Supervisor’s Shoes for Objective Analysis
Team members when not convinced with the work instructions per self-analysis then they need to interpret keeping in view of reporting supervisor’s instructions aligning with the work targets, follow ground rules and work ethics for effective team communication.

5#Understanding Organization’s Vision, Mission and Goals
Team members and middle management should have broad awareness of organization’s vision, mission, and goals. These are essential to avoid biases in communication. Biases in communication have severe impact on its fidelity and hence effectiveness.

6# Awareness of Different Organizational Work Cultures
No organization operates independently on its own, rather it exists within the larger ecosystem of the enterprise. There will be suppliers, contractors, regulatory bodies and partnering organizations, with whom top and middle management as well as team members interact. Hence, they should have awareness of different organizational cultures for effective team work and effective communication.

7# Inherent Political Environment
Politics is inevitable and it will happen in any organization. Politics when used for the betterment of projects leads to good outcomes. However, when the inherent political culture leads to biases, then communication become problematic and many times, this leads to pre-determined mindset and communication gaps.

Middle management and team members should be politically aware and avoid such kind of biases.

Conclusion
In conclusion, I would say organizations should have mentor trainings and periodic counselling for both team members and management to ensure effective communication.

Brief Profile
K.Suresh
Manager – Mechanical (Projects)
Installation and Execution of Industrial Projects in Oil & Gas, Power Sector, Plant Commissioning.

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Monday, February 04, 2019

PMP Protein: Emotional Quotient – A Risk Factor

By Manjunath R, PMP

Taking ownership is the best way to get the things done. No matter what project management methodology is adapted, taking ownership always works. It is all about involving completely and taking accountability of the consequences. One needs to give his or her mind, heart and soul to the activity involved and make sure it is delivered with maximum possible efficiency. It requires lot of attention to detail. In the sense, one needs to understand the consequences of each actions. This is nothing but risk analysis.

Risk analysis is carried out in planning stage. Also, during execution unexpected things prop up and will become threat to the project progress. One such risk is emotions flowing through the project TEAM. The emotional balance of team members plays a very important role in the journey of the project. The emotional quotient should be kept in a watch list. If pulse of the team members isn’t understood properly, it will have an impact on project constraints.

Most of the times, a good rapport between the team members will be a great motivational factor. The team leader needs to respect the team member’s emotional bonding with the rest of the team. Efforts should be made to have an honest relationship, not only for the sake of the project, but also otherwise.

An honest relationship always works, may it be professional or family or social life. Team motivating programs should be designed to enhance the cohesiveness of the team. If team members happen to lose faith in one another, then the fate of the project will be at stake. Having said that, people should not mix up their personal problems with profession. The distinction should be manifested.

Conclusion: To summarize, every team member including the team lead, should have a great bonding which will eventually contribute to the self-development as well as strategic alignment to the vision and mission of the organization.

Author: Manjunath R
Manjunath R is a project management professional in construction industry. He is a graduate Civil Engineer. He has been involved in construction industry as Deputy General Manager working for REVA University. He has worked with several reputed organizations in Bangalore. He is a certified Project Management Professional (PMP) from Project Management Institute (PMI).

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Wednesday, January 10, 2018

PMP Protein: Organizational (Project) Management – A Facelift

By Manjunath R, PMP

Management is neither about blaming one another for the failures. Nor it is about beating around the bush. Management is neither about putting the ball in other’s court. Nor it is about implementing and practicing irrelevant standards. Management is definitely not about controlling people.

Management is alignment of thoughts, processes and efforts in line with vision and mission of an organization. Management is about streamlining and channelizing the energy flow towards achievement of a common goal. This needs a lot of insight into the abilities, weaknesses, strengths, egos, interests, ambitions of people involved.

Directing the people may bring short term success, but eventually fails to bring out the long-term goal seeking attitude and commitment. It is so obvious that the human nature is so influenced by the environment around. If the environment is kept aligned with the goals, then, for sure people will also have the same influence in their actions.

In order to design the management tools for strategic alignment, we need to have an understanding of laws of nature. If we observe nature, we will understand how it works. Seasons after seasons come and go. They are all connected and self-driven. No one creates a path for the river to reach the sea. The river flows in a gradient obeying law of gravity. Tools, techniques and processes should be so designed that they should collectively lead to the success effortlessly.

An important factor which influences the strategic alignment to the vision and mission of an organization is the kind of people involved. Whether they are self-motivated, visionaries or they have to be groomed, the kind of people will decide the fate of the organization.

If likeminded people with positive attitude sharing a common passion work together for a common goal, work becomes fun and goals are achieved effortlessly.

One more important factor which influences the strategic alignment is awareness of the purpose of the establishment of the organization. Most of the people are unaware of the purpose of the establishment of the organization in which they are working for decades. Nor they will be aware of the vision and mission of the organization. With people like them, organization may run, but, can’t grow tangibly or intangibly. Neither will the organization have any social value nor productive working atmosphere.

The working atmosphere should be so high with energy and enthusiasm that people should forget everything else while working. Creating such environment will also lead to personal growth and happiness of each individual.

The best way to create an enthusiastic environment is to make the stakeholders beneficiaries of the success or failure. It need not be only tangible. It’s the sense of ownership which adds the flavor to the involvement of people.

Fear is one major factor which spoils the working atmosphere, thus bringing down the productivity. This is also major factor leading to employee attrition. Fear may be due to boss, client, customer, not meeting the deadlines, not meeting quality standards etc. Fear also brings down the confidence level of an individual, thus bringing down his/her capabilities. Efforts should be made to identify and keep any kind of fear out of the system.

Many organizations start working without creating ambient atmosphere to work. It is like jumping into the freezing ocean without proper accessories and gears. Even a champion swimmer can’t be able to make it. Organizations should focus on creating proper tools and techniques which motivate, appreciate, elevate one’s capabilities, so as to make them a better person. This will have tangible benefits like increased productivity and intangible benefits like employee satisfaction and development.

Creation of tools and techniques is an iterative process. It needs continuous improvement from time to time. Regular feedback from employees will surely help improve the process.

As Technology changes from time to time, human behavior also changes. Keeping this into account processes should be altered and framed.

Author: Manjunath R
Manjunath R is a project management professional in construction industry . He is a graduate Civil Engineer. He is passed out from BIET (VTU) Davanagere in year 2005.He has been involved in construction industry as Deputy General Manager working for PDD Infratech. He has worked with several reputed organizations in Bangalore. He is having 12 plus years of hands on experience. He is a certified Project Management Professional (PMP) from Project Management Institute (PMI).

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