Which Game Are You Playing?

It is also important to distinguish the game you are playing. If you are flying an airplane, you rely on checklists and follow air safety rules and established processes. Aviation is a great example of safety and reliability based on established procedures, documentation, and learning from failures. Air travel remains the safest in terms of deaths per passenger mile. However, we must recognize that flying an airplane is different from designing and building an airplane and requires a different approach, as evidenced by the challenging development of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner project, which was $12 billion to $18 billion over budget and many years behind schedule. Projects like Boeing's Dreamliner are examples of the DANCE in action—the complete solution is not known at the start, there are many options, redesign of not just the structure but also the materials (use of composite materials), new and untried technology, complicated supply chains, and multitier outsourcing. See Figures 1.1 and 1.2, Building the plane versus Flying the plane.

It is important to understand the distinction between designing and building versus flying the plane as you implement project management practices. Do you recognize the need for a different approach?

It is like playing two different games—pool and pinball (Figures 1.3 and 1.4, Playing Pool versus Playing Pinball).

Pool (billiards) is based on a mechanistic model, which is based on linear cause and effect. Mastery requires understanding the rules and dynamics of the game, and with deliberate practice, you can control and master the variables and expect predictable outcomes. Pinball, however, has all the DANCE characteristics—as soon as the ball is launched, you do not know where exactly it is going to go. It may hit a target and gain momentum or slow down; it is dynamic and unpredictable. To succeed at pinball, you need to recognize that the nature of the game is different and requires a different approach. You can't follow a solid plan or keep flipping aimlessly. The irony is that organizations do not recognize the difference and apply the rules of pool, even when they are playing a different game of pinball. Project managers and PMOs need to understand that the mechanical mindset of traditional approaches can be limiting and insufficient to deal with a rapidly changing, uncertain, and unpredictable DANCE‐world. To play pinball, you need to constantly sense, respond, adapt, and adjust (SRAA). Over a period with practice, you can decipher the dynamics and become a pinball wizard. But organizations are far more complex and hard to decode the DANCE that impacts them. They require a nuanced and context‐sensitive application of process and methods and humility to understand you cannot control everything; in fact, in pinball when you try to control, you go into tilt, and it's game over.

Traditional project management and PMOs that do not recognize the difference between the need for a different approach for the two games are set up to scale for efficiencies. They overemphasize planning, prevention, prediction, and process, which enables organizations to achieve consistent results in a mostly simple to complicated world. Pointing out the distinction between complicated and complex is important. Figure 1.5 describes the complexity continuum.

A bicycle is simple; an aircraft engine is complicated, not complex; you can rely on a manual to identify all the components and their behavior in predictable ways. Now, think of a stubborn horse, a team member, or any living thing that is hard to predict or control is complex.

Dealing with Complexity

Organizations, project environments, social networks, industries, governments, traffic flows, nature, and biological systems are examples of complex adaptive systems.

A complex adaptive system is a system in which a perfect understanding of the individual parts does not automatically convey a perfect understanding of the whole system's behavior. Complexity science is an interdisciplinary field that delves into understanding the properties of complex systems. Following are some of the properties of complex adaptive systems summarized from the work of De Toni and Comello, viewed through the lens of application to project management and PMOs:

• Self‐organization and emergence. Spontaneous emergence of new structures from the bottom‐up; the behavior of the system differs from the simple addition of its parts; components self‐organize to produce capabilities and outcomes that are neither obvious nor predictable.
• The Impossibility of forecast. Boundary state between predictability and unpredictability, impossible to forecast precisely.
• Power of connections. Everything is connected to everything else; identifying and strengthening crucial connecting nodes is key.
• Circular causality. The effect has a feedback on its own cause; cause and effect are nondeterministic.
• Hologrammatic principle. The part is in the whole, and the whole is in the part.
• Try and learn. Trial and error is the only way to learn and adapt.
• Edge of chaos. State of dynamic balance between order and disorder.

The DNA of strategy execution has evolved based on these principles, and in this book, we will delve into the practical application of these properties to next‐generation project management and PMOs.

Organizations and project environments are complex adaptive systems. It is necessary to create awareness and classify project complexity to determine the appropriate management approach. Projects move and shift between simple, complicated, complex, and chaos along the complexity continuum. The DANCE elements can be present on any project, regardless of size or cost or other elements and can either impact individually, or interplay in combination. What may seem like a minor element can have a ripple effect with unintended consequences on any project or program.

Key Question – How to Redesign and Organize for Increasing DANCE and Complexity?

Traditional approaches evolved to iterative and incremental with progressive elaboration and rolling wave planning, but today we are no longer dealing with waves—it is more like a tsunami. The volume, variety, and velocity of changes are intensifying the DANCE. We are in a constant state of flux, and the challenges are less predictable. Digitization accompanied by breakthrough technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning is creating multiple inflection points. Though inflection points have always been a part of business reality, the frequency of inflection points has rapidly increased and is disrupting established businesses. Projects in today's environment are akin to building the plane while you are flying it. The path forward is not clear, and the unforeseen and unexpected are happening at a faster pace, causing a greater degree of turbulence. Earlier, you could predict the ebb and flow of order and chaos, or equilibrium and disequilibrium, but today's world is characteristic of unpredictable instability and disequilibrium.

Figure 1.6 lists the traditional approaches we have relied on for the simple to complicated. The question is, how do we thrive in an increasingly DANCE‐world where the problem is unknown or unknowable? How do we deal with wicked problems that are difficult because of incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements that are difficult to recognize, and the solution requires experimentation and learning?

This book delves into the question of what approaches are needed in the realm of complicated to complex, and how to balance between them.

Question Everything

In the world of efficiency and effectiveness, we could survive and prosper by finding many alternatives to solve problems. Techniques like brainstorming, which aim to come up with as many solutions as possible, are still popular. You can quickly brainstorm multiple solutions; the challenge is that you could be working on the wrong question. The problem is not the answers but the questions. How do we know if we are asking the right question? How do we learn to ask better questions? To get better at strategy execution, you must challenge yourself and your teams to ask beautiful questions. Warren Berger, in his book, A More Beautiful Question, explains, “A beautiful question is an ambitious yet actionable question that can begin to shift the way we perceive or think about something—and that might serve as a catalyst to bring about change.” Each chapter starts with leading questions. These questions will, of course, be addressed, but I hope that by the end of the book you will have more beautiful questions that provide new insights and open new doors. Like Larry Page, CEO of Alphabet, we need to learn to ask 10× questions that require answers that have 10 times the impact of previous solutions. You will learn to frame your challenges with better questions and continue to challenge the status quo and seek new perspectives with the power of questions.

“Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way.”

Alan Watts

Focus on the Purpose of Business

How would you respond to the question, “What is the purpose of business?” Most people respond, “to make money … increase shareholder value … to provide customer value … to make a sustainable impact … etc.”

Way back in 1954, Peter Drucker responded:

“There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer. The customer is a foundation of a business and keeps it in existence. The customer alone gives employment. And it is to supply the customer that society entrusts wealth-producing resources to the business enterprise.”

He wrote these words in his book The Practice of Management, as far back as 1954, it is only now we are seeing that organizations are getting this. Think about it: if you don't have a customer, you don't have a business. That's why we use the services of companies like Google, Facebook, and many others for free; their job is only to create new customers. Once you have loyal customers, there are many ways to monetize. Drucker's words are echoing as the Copernican revolution in management is shaping up. As observed by author Stephen Denning, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the firm was in the center, and the customer was on the periphery, just as before Copernicus in 1543 it was believed that the Earth was the center of the universe. With increasing choices and open access to products and information, it is hypercompetitive, and businesses can't succeed without putting the customer at the center, to make their products and services go viral, and to create and keep customers.

We hear strategy execution leaders like Jeff Bezos of Amazon say, “We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It's our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.” Shifting to a customer‐centric perspective can have a profound impact, as one of the nonprofit healthcare organizations we worked with started referring to patients as customers. This simple change precipitated a mind shift, and instead of viewing people as a set of symptoms, it began treating them differently.

The approach in this book is to start with the customer at the center of everything you do from a strategy execution standpoint in project management and PMO. Start with the question, “Who are our real customers, end‐users, and stakeholders?” and develop deep customer first, customer experience, customer success (helping customers easily adopt and succeed with our products, services, and systems), and customer creation and retention orientation. The questions we will be looking at are, how do you better organize and manage projects in this customer‐centric, customer‐first, customer‐success world? Is it possible to create a project management and PMO platform that connects, facilitates, and enables an end‐to‐end customer experience?

Apps versus Operating System

We are constantly looking for the new cool app, the next shiny tool, template, or best practice that is perhaps the silver bullet that is going to solve our problem. The challenge is that we can acquire the app, but it might not work because the operating system (OS) is incompatible. You cannot run an iOS app on Android or vice versa unless it is designed for both. It is important to understand this distinction between apps and OSs. Before you can acquire or use the app, you need to prepare the organization with the right OS. Unfortunately, we see a rush for the next app, method, tool, or technique, without consideration for compatibility with the organizational OS—the prevailing mindset and related context and culture that is needed for it to flourish. It is like rolling out the latest tennis gear, without realizing that your organization is designed for basketball—it is only going to add to the confusion as illustrated in Figure 1.8. Next‐generation leaders focus first on the operating system of the organization, preparing and rewiring the mindset of the players, before implementing the methodology, tools, templates, or best practices. This book aims to do that by focusing more on the OS level, besides providing the apps.

Process versus Behavior

Based on a mechanical factory mindset, most organizational efforts are geared toward processes and systems and not the people who use them. Our ongoing project management and PMO survey since 2005 highlights the fact that PMOs spend 85 percent of their time on developing, documenting, standardizing, refining, training, and measuring process and methods. Less than 10 percent proactively plan for the impact of organizational and behavioral changes that these processes cause. As some have quipped, that process is fine until people get involved because it is the people who are involved in designing, executing, misusing, or subverting the processes. Wherever it is possible, strive to remove the human from the process with automation of repeatable processes. For the rest of the processes, our approach in this book is to focus on the human, and the interaction between process and behavior. For each process, we will consider the behavioral aspects and emphasize the balance between the two. While process and methods are important, it is the people who have to adopt the processes, and adapt to benefit from them.

Simplicity

“Our enemy is not the competition; it is the unnecessary complexity in our processes,” remarked an executive. This observation is a reality that resonates with many, as in the project management and PMO world we are guilty of making things more complicated then they need to be. As Einstein noted, “It is easy to make things complicated; it is hard to make them simple.” We will strive hard to simplify and exploit unrecognized simplicities. As Andy Benoit observed, “Most geniuses—especially those who lead others—prosper not by deconstructing intricate complexities but by exploiting unrecognized simplicities.” This is the heart of our approach, and simplicity is the foundational theme that will echo throughout the ideas, models, methods, and tools discussed in this book. In Chapter 11 we take an in‐depth look at this topic.

Holistic

In an ideal world, the organizational mirror would be whole, in which you could see a coherent corporate strategy and structure, mission, vision, values, strategies, and objectives. The strategy is linked to execution and operations. There is an aligned and prioritized portfolio, with well‐defined programs and projects, and everything is linked and transparent. But the reality is messy, and typical organizations are fractured and not as coherent and organized—even more so in today's DANCE and disruptive world.

To execute strategy effectively, you have to think holistically. As Peter Senge, author of the seminal book, The Fifth Discipline, in his work on systems thinking wrote, “Business and human endeavor are systems … we tend to focus on snapshots of isolated parts of the system. And then wonder why our deepest problems never get solved.” The role of project management, PMOs, and strategy execution leaders should be to connect and build bridges, find commonalities, reduce redundancies, and spread ideas that work.

The project world is characteristic of reductionism and breaking things down, and the heart of the project management approach is breakdown structures. While it makes sense to break things down to better plan and manage, the challenge is bringing them back together. Even when you try to integrate, due to the cracks caused by the breakdown, it is hard to patch and get a holistic perspective to optimize the whole.

Identifying the foundational DNA elements across the management of business and related projects, programs, portfolios, and PMOs provides insights and opportunities to connect and optimize the whole. It provides the opportunity to leverage the complex systems property: the part is in the whole, and the whole is in the part.

In this book, we will take a holistic perspective; instead of separating things, we will try to bring them back together. While there is value in separating portfolios, programs, projects, PMOs, and organizational project management (OPM), we will look at them holistically by looking at the DNA level and identifying the common characteristics and themes that apply across the board. In the spirit of the ‘whole’ we will use project and program, and project management (in a broad organizational context) and PMO interchangeably; many of the ideas overlap and apply when you look at things at the foundational DNA level.

How Can You Use This Book?

The impact of digitization and disruption and the intensification of the DANCE requires a rethink and reset of how we organize and manage. This book will present a holistic approach by decoding the DNA of strategy execution and provide new perspectives and practical applications, tools, and examples for each of the DNA elements. This book can be used to:

• Develop a playbook for effective strategy execution.
• Improve your effectiveness as next‐generation managers, leaders, owners, and executives.
• Gain new perspectives and insights to develop skills necessary to thrive in today's turbulent world.
• Build a next‐generation project management and PMO platform for strategy execution.
• Decode the core elements of the DNA of management and strategy execution.
• Prepare your organization to lead and implement agile transformation in an effective way.
• Redesign and transform project management and PMO, and apply next‐generation ideas to take your PM capabilities and PMO to the next level.
• Balance the need for foundational management discipline with the need for agility, creativity and innovation, and achieve the rigor but without rigidity.
• Evolve to an organizational project management (OPM) and PMO Center of Excellence (CoE).
• Foster effective measurement, feedback and learning for continuous improvement and innovation.
• Find ways to connect and bridge the gaps across organizational silos.
• Challenge conventional and unproductive management practices.
• Change negative project management and PMO perception.
• Measure and increase business value and impact, and gain buy‐in, with raving customers and promoters for project management and PMO.
• Improve organizational project management (OPM) and PMO maturity by developing intelligence in each of the DNA areas of strategy execution.
• Improve overall organizational effectiveness and innovation capabilities.

The next chapter will start by providing the context as to why and how to reframe the organizational operating system and mindset for agility, why project management and PMO efforts fail, and what are the next generation ideas to evolve and adapt. In Chapter 3 we will decode the DNA of strategy execution. In the following chapters, we will look at each element of the DNA in detail, starting with strategy in Chapter 4, and execution in Chapter 5. The other elements—governance, connect, measure, change, and learn—will be covered in Chapters 6 through 10. Chapters 11 and 12 focus on enabling aspects to apply the DNA of strategy execution with simplicity and balance to thrive at the edge of chaos.