Project Managers in the organisation of the future

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Project Managers in the Organisation of the FutureBryan Fenech

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Who am I?• Founder – Building

the Organisation of the Tomorrow (BOOT) Forum• Speaker, researcher

and consultant – Business Transformation Programs, PPM

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Key themes• What does the organisation of the future look like?• What is the role of Project Managers in the organisation of the

future?• What are the implications for us now?

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Organisation of the future• Research across a

number of dimensions to get a comprehensive picture• A comparative study

to give context – traditional versus future organisation

Determine

s

• Environment and Context

Frames

• Enterprise Logic

Requires

• Strategic Imperatives

Facilitated by

• Key Capabilities

Enabled by

• Governance, Leadership and Social Practices

• Structure

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Environment and context

Traditional Organisation Organisation of the Future

A socio-economic era built on the technological breakthroughs of the industrial revolution

A socio-economic era built on the technological breakthroughs of the ICT revolution (and now robotics and biotech)

Increasing globalisation – opening up of vast new markets for products and services

Unprecedented globalization – competition, dynamic and volatile markets, short product lifecycles

A world of unlimited resources to be exploited – the New World, Africa, India, China and the East

A world of limited resources to be conserved and sustained

Positivism as the dominant worldview Constructivism as a challenge to the dominant positivist world view

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Enterprise logic


Raison d’etre – a vehicle for achieving personal financial wealth and power

Raison d’etre – a vehicle for achieving social as well as financial value and meeting a broad range of objectives

Beneficiaries – a narrow set of shareholders, the capitalist project

Beneficiaries – a broad range of stakeholders, the social enterprise project

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Strategic imperatives


Standardisation and repeatability – mass production

Differentiation and innovation – mass customisation

Size and stability Nimbleness, flexibility and responsiveness

A relentless managerial focus on cost containment, reducing unit costs

A relentless leadership focus on investment in new products and services

Economies of scale Economies of scope

“Sweating” value from tangible assets – property, plant and machinery

Creating value in intangible assets – knowledge and the social capital that underpins it

Beating the competition Building strategic alliances and partnerships

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Key capabilities


Strategy formulation Strategy implementation

Operational management Project management

Development and application of specialist technical knowledge

The commoditisation of specialist technical knowledge and the need to dynamically reconfigure and apply collaborative knowledge resources – “dynamic capabilities” and “absorptive capacity”

Management – causal rationality, from a pre-determined goal and given set of means identify the fastest, cheapest, most efficient etc

Leadership and entrepreneurialism – effectual reasoning, from a given set of means allow goals to emerge contingently over time

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Governance, leadership and social practicesTraditional Organisation Organisation of the Future

Application of principles of command and control economics to internal organisation – central control of resources and planning

Application of principles of market economics to internal organisation – devolving of power and decision making and free flow of resources

Management practices embedded with the strategic intent of command and control

Leadership practices embedded with the strategic intent of empowerment and facilitation

Rules based on rational legalistic principles – sine ira ac studio

A negotiated order based on principles of community, and renewal practices required to manage sustainability and success

Centralised leadership Distributed leadership

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Structure


Bureaucracy, hierarchy Networked, cellularSegregation of labour by discipline into functional silos

Integration of labour into autonomous multi-disciplinary teams

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Some other ideas• 3 things to consider• The OOTF as an emergent and political phenomenon• The signification of hierarchy with structure as a justification for

retaining layers of management – the “semi-structured organisation”

• Ambidexterity and matrix organisation as reactionary expressions

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Questions

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References• Dovey, K. & Fenech, B. 2007, The role of enterprise logic in the failure of organisations

to learn and transform, Management Learning, vol. 38 no. 5, pp 573-590• Hamel, G. 2011, “First, Let’s Fire All the Managers”, Harvard Business Review, December• Ramsey, M & Barkhuizen, N 2011, Organisational design elements and competencies for

optimising the expertise of knowledge workers in a shared services centre, SA Journal of Human Resource Management, 9(1), Art. #307, 15 pages

• Tissen, R. & Deprez, F. L. 2008, Toward a spatial theory of organisations: creating new organizational forms to improve business performance, NRG Working Paper no. 08-04

• Acemoglu, D. & Robinson, J. A. 2012, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty, Profile Books, London.

• Bakan, A. 2005, The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power, Free Press, New York.

• Herman, E. S. & Chomsky, N. 2008, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, The Bodley Head, London.

• Stiglitz, J. E. 2010, Freefall: America, Free Markets and the Sinking of the World Economy, Norton and Company, New York