Acceptance Of The Project Culture

It is important for a project to have a specific culture. It is the culture of a group that determines what we think is essential and how we interact with others. It’s how we do thing around here.

But not all individuals like the same culture. People have preferences. Some like plan-driven approaches. Some like pure agile.

Three things determine the acceptance of the project culture…

No threat.

The new way of doing things should not threaten your position. If you don’t produce much, but manage to fly under the radar, unnoticed, you are not happy when radical transparency is introduced. We discussed the perceived threat that agile might bring some weeks ago:

“The difficulty comes when Agile starts to create transparency and accountability. Most organizations are not used to that, and will go through many “growing pains” that will either slow down or completely stop an Agile adoption effort. … When the Project Manager starts pushing more decisions onto the sponsor, and more accountability onto the project team, things can get awkward and frustrating.”

Make sense.

The “way of doing things” should make sense. It should be perceived as being useful. Some company policies can make no sense, and enforcing them onto the team can be a source for resistance. We all have experienced these kind of situations.

A friend of mine told me once … “On a project where I was one of several PMs, weekly progress reports had to be written and send to all other Project Managers. After a while I got the impression that no one was actually reading these things, because of the kind of questions I was getting – answers were all in the reports. As I was not fond of reporting just for the sake of reporting anyway, I started little irritating experiments like issuing identical reports with different dates, adding nonsense risks, just to see if anyone was paying attention. As you might have guessed, no responses what so ever.”

Right group.

We, Project Managers, radiate to the outside world our icons like Gantt Charts, two-digits precise risk assessments and large documents that seems to cover every little aspect imaginable. If you are a member of our group, you ooze control. We also have a specific language that sets us apart from other mortals. By adopting our symbols, our rituals and speak newbie PMs try to affiliate themselves with the group called Professional Project Managers.

If you want to be affiliated with a certain social group, you have no problem what so ever, in adopting the rules of engagement associated with that group.