ours]
People have more competency than technology when it comes to strategy execution. This is an interesting rebuttal to the idea that software programs and new methodologies are the wave of the future when, in fact, people are the problem.
The Gartner report goes on to say:
Executing strategy is hard because the organization needs to begin thinking, investing, and ultimately, performing in the manner required by a new business model, while keeping its current business model operating to ensure short-term revenue.50
Bingo. Here we have the reason identifying and maintaining Strategic Alignment is so difficult in most companies.
Finding, hiring, and retaining innovative employees to staff a construct like an SRO will be crucial if organizations are to succeed at executing new and evolving strategies. People who can deal with uncertainty, risk, and more-than-occasional failure will be required, making this a significant culture shift.51
Interesting that these qualities are key characteristics of high performing project managers. The article continues:
For the foreseeable future however, strategy execution is the best all-around fitness program that an enterprise can adopt. Building the organizational muscle to run the race of effective strategy execution will be as important as winning the race.52
The Operations Executive controls how team members perceive the strategy behind a project. While the bigger mission of the organization might be clear, the strategy underpinning a specific project probably won’t be. It’s your job to chip away at your own preconditioning and squash your assumptions, your bias, and your WIIFM agendas. It’s your job to maintain fidelity and lay everything out in plain sight. Then, bring your team into alignment as well.
“It’s your job to maintain fidelity and lay everything out in plain sight.”
Everyone who grows up on the Chesapeake Bay dreams of owning a boat. Jeff Welch, one of the coauthors of this book, was raised on the bay. A lot of his friends had boats, so when it was his good fortune to have the money to buy one, he called upon his network to help him locate the perfect vessel.
Two options revealed themselves: a well-kept fishing boat with a good-sized outboard motor and an aging 30-foot beast with two high-performance Chevy 350s. Jeff did not make the sensible choice. Dying to get his new boat in the water and satisfied that he had worked on it enough to make it sea worthy, he decided to go on a shake-down run.
In the protected creeks, that windy October day wasn’t alarming in any way. But after leaving the sanctuary of the smaller creeks, he found that the bay was whipped into frothy three-foot chop. Jeff had been out in the bay a lot, but never in these conditions. He wouldn’t have tried it in most boats that he’d been in, but this was a beast. His beast.
Without the proper level of risk mitigation or what we call spectrum analysis, he let’er rip and buried both throttles. That’s when it happened. It was almost like a religious experience, an epiphany. At approximately 70 mph, the three-foot chop all but disappeared. The beast ignored them and plowed along like they didn’t matter at all.
But then he noticed something else. Huge swells of water formed right in front his eyes. A lifetime of being on the bay, as well as many of the taverns around it, and no one told him these swells even existed. He watched them move and saw a way to mitigate risk.
Where they collided, the water surface lifted and became a mound he had to avoid. Where they parted, they left a giant hole, also best avoided. No one wants to drive into a hole at 70 mph.
So, there he was, witnessing a dance of swells that he had probably seen before but never knew existed. With this newfound perspective, he piloted the beast around the waist of the mounds, avoiding the holes, until he was satisfied that the beast was performing well and headed home.
It was a truly remarkable experience. The big takeaway: with the right change in perspective, you can see patterns that were just out of sight. Jeff didn’t witness a new reality. Those swells had always been there. He was just lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time, so he could finally recognize them.
The problem with project failure rates has been around for a long time. People have tried to fix them for a long time, too. When we look around now, we see that almost everyone is focusing on the three-foot chop, thinking that if they eliminate those, they’ll be able to manage their operations better. The truth is below the chop. It’s those giant swells colliding and parting to change the project environment until continuing on your original course could prove disastrous.
The best way to avoid the swells is to maintain Strategic Alignment.
Choosing the Red Pill
Over the past few years, the entire project management industry has been struggling to figure out how to operationalize Strategic Alignment at the project level. Blue pill executives play their cards close to the chest, and blue pill project managers are not comfortable pushing boundaries. That disconnect in communication runs deep.
Enterprise PMOs are PMI’s latest push toward Strategic Alignment, and this may be their greatest contribution to the space. Known in the industry as EPMOs, this task force monitors several teams at once, watching the overall impact of their projects on the company. Because they include top cover, EPMOs create a safe space, so it’s easier to identify the swells beneath the surface and maneuver successfully around them.
“There’s a difference between knowing the path and walking the path.”105
~Morpheus in The Matrix.
Even agile methodology makes an attempt at forcing Strategic Alignment by handing ownership of the project to the Operations Executive. The executive already knows the Business Value potential and can act accordingly. That may be one way to do it, but piling extra duties on people who have no time or focus for them only creates other problems.
Strategic Alignment requires fidelity in the true value potential. This level of reality feels risky. Such a commitment to truth is very similar to choosing the red pill.
As Morpheus told Neo in The Matrix:
You take the blue pill, the story ends and you wake up in your bed and you believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. Remember, all I’m offering is the truth, nothing more.53
The Red Pill Operations Executive takes the risk and embraces transparency and clarity. This is where unvarnished reality is expected, discussion is open, and tough questions are welcome, even invited. Questions such as:
•If this venture actually costs twice the budget, is it still worth doing?
•How about if it takes twice as long or runs out an extra quarter?
•What if your corporate strategy changes and the goals of this initiative need to be realigned?
•What kind of reporting do you need to make sure you can properly communicate how this project stays in Strategic Alignment?
•Where is additional value that we can capture in and around this project?
•What are we overlooking?
When
