The most common organizational solution is the cross-functional team: a committee of people drawn from the relevant departments to solve particular problems. Unfortunately, many cross-functional teams fall far short of delivering effective and efficient solutions. They rarely have the time they need to resolve their different ways of thinking. They are also limited by their conflicting functional priorities and sometimes by a lack of clear accountability. What’s more, many of these teams are temporary; they will dissolve once the project is over, and their members may not work together again. There are also far too many of these teams, and the more there are, the more they tend to proliferate. When all cross-functional teams are temporary, an organization has little incentive to overcome these hurdles. Permanent cross-functional teams tend to fare better. A growing number of long-standing innovation groups, for example, bring together disparate functional skills (typically R&D, marketing, customer insights, and IT) to facilitate the launch of new products or services. Some of these teams are relatively informal, whereas others involve major shifts to the organizational structure. In one case, to develop its portfolio management capability, Pfizer Consumer (before it was sold in 2006) set up communities of practice: semi-formal ongoing networks that included lawyers, health professionals, and marketing experts. These communities helped spread key ideas and best practices to brand and product groups around the world. From permanent cross-functional teams, it’s only a small step to having formal capabilities teams. These operate outside the functional structure entirely, led by top executives with newly created job descriptions: Chief Digital, Risk, or Innovation Officer. Members of these teams, no matter how specialized their skills, follow a cross-functional career, reporting to people who may not share their background but who have a common commitment to the capability and all the projects associated with it. The functional departments, instead of managing projects, focus on learning and development and specialized guidance for the relevant staff assigned to capabilities. Examples include the IKEA sustainability team and Natura’s supply-chain management council, whose purview includes sourcing, manufacturing, logistics, and aspects of the relationship with sales consultants. The capabilities team model can be likened to a symphony orchestra; the conductor is responsible for the whole work, but if a soloist needs help, he or she will turn to masters of the particular instrument for guidance. The most farsighted functional leaders are not just waiting for these changes to affect them. They are taking the first step by helping evaluate the current state of their company’s capabilities system and suggesting ways to bring it closer to its potential. This is part of the functional leader’s new mandate as a strategic partner for the enterprise: delivering not what individual constituents demand, but what the whole enterprise needs. When you build a few critical cross-functional capabilities—and scale them—you break free of the trap of trying to be world-class at everything but mastering nothing. Don’t treat benchmarking as the path to success. Instead, compete on the select few capabilities that deliver on your strategy, and instill them everywhere you do business. Adapted from the Harvard Business Review Press book Strategy That Works: How Winning Companies Close the Strategy-to-Execution Gap. citation
Projects fail every day.
The reasons projects fail are known.
Facing up to those reasons is never easy
No one except perhaps your competitors want your projects to fail.
This following sentence is difficult to write.
In some organisations there are people for political, and other unhealthy human reasons who would prefer a project to fail. A good project management framework will address the unhealthy issues, by removing fear (everyone can see how it will be achieved), removing fear of uncertainty, by being transparent,
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no one except perhaps your competitors want your projects to fail.
The reasons they do are known.
Facing up to those reasons
Everyone involved in an organisation is entitled to think of their career. Some projects by their nature can be seen as poison chalices,
Projects should never be seen as poison chalices. The project management process will bring this to the fore quickly and they are correctly modified (realistic timelines, large increases in budgets etc.) or cancelled.
It is a higher goal of project management to protect those involved from unwarranted judgement.
"I want a new system in 3 months"
