Organizational agility—the ability of an organization to change rapidly in response to external conditions while maintaining a customer-centric focus—is rapidly becoming a key indicator of organizational success.
Last month, the Project Management Institute Global Executive Council met in Prague. Comprised of executives from leading businesses and government agencies worldwide, the Council meeting focused almost exclusively on organizational agility. Council members identified three key factors critical to whether organizations can be truly agile:
- Addressing key challenges head on. Entrepreneur and TED speaker Margaret Heffernan spoke to the Council about “willful blindness,” or ignoring the obvious threats facing organizations. Willful blindness is often characterized by recognizing, yet disregarding, key initial indicators of problems with project/program performance; avoiding intellectual diversity (by gravitating toward like-minded talent and perspectives); and struggling to connect decision makers to core data, strategy, and policy objectives.
- Promoting flexibility and communication. Encouraging flexibility, collaboration, and communication while ensuring alignment to strategy and customer focus leads to better decisions and increased organizational agility. This was further confirmed by PMI research on organizational agility, which finds that 81 percent of organizations with project teams that are flexible, collaborative, and communicate well have projects that meet original goals.
- Embracing change. Leadership consultant and Forbes contributor Steve Denning noted that most management frameworks and philosophies have failed to evolve despite rampant changes in external market conditions, government policies, technology, and customer expectations.
While private-sector organizations struggle to keep pace and achieve agility amid a tsunami of change, government is far more challenged. The U.S. government is tackling important business and technology changes, from addressing cybersecurity threats to moving to cloud-based services, while dealing with bureaucracies and often outdated processes. These conditions are what make it difficult to drive the culture-change in government with the hopes of increasing the agility of agencies to allow teams to more effectively lead successful project and program efforts with a customer-minded focus.
Portfolio Management is not a concept that is widely discussed when seeking ways to increase the agility of an organization. With so many projects and programs to be managed in a constantly changing environment, though, portfolio management is a key way to help government agencies define and execute against a blueprint that is a true measure of their priorities, strategy, and policy objectives. It helps an agency’s portfolio to better deliver on key requirements while being more responsive to stakeholders. Properly structured portfolios allow the conversation to progress from the fundamentals of budget, scope and schedule to key business parameters of prioritization, alignment, resourcing, and benefits. This, in turn, allows agencies to not only validate they have the right projects and programs in the portfolio to deliver on the policy goals at hand, but it also allows them to execute them at the right time, increasing responsiveness to external conditions and agility.
As mentioned in a previous blog post, the U.S. Department of Defense is a great example of the opportunity at hand for organizational agility through better portfolio management. While DoD has mature project and program management capabilities, the Government Accountability Office has identified the need for improved agency portfolio management. At DoD and elsewhere, adopting and implementing portfolio management leading practices by senior executives and decision-makers will enable better business decisions and the better alignment of resources with policy objectives. Absent this, the goal of an agile and effective government becomes elusive.
That said, key leaders inside the beltway are encouragingly beginning to take notice of, and focus on, the attributes and outcomes associated with organizations and enterprises with heightened agility. Released earlier this year, The President’s Budget for Fiscal Year 2016marks the first time I have seen a President’s budget proposal highlighting the need for organizational agility and a focus on customer experience and services. This focus builds on promising initiatives throughout the government, such as the Digital Services team’s U.S Digital Services Playbookbeing further enhanced by White House Chief Information Officer Tony Scott, to increase the delivery of technology projects and programs in as agile a manner as possible. Similarly, it is worth mentioning that organizations that standardize their project and program delivery practices boast a level of agility on average three-times higher than those with the ad hoc approach. As a result, the recently introduced Program Management Improvement and Accountability Act of 2015encourages agencies to embrace effective program management standards and practices to improve government efficiency, effectiveness, and yes—agility.
Change is hard. Culture change in an organization is even harder. At the core of these efforts is the most complex variable of all—people. Increasing agility and responsiveness of large organizations like the hundreds of agencies and sub-agencies in government requires teams of people to implement change, leaders to articulate the vision, and policy that supports them. And that’s why the topic of organizational agility will remain central to the federal government’s march towards greater efficiency and effectiveness, and its mission to put its customers first.
