Progress Your Business Story!

On my work desktop is a small library of books.

It shows you the progression of my business story…

How does your business story compare?

Book Knowledge

There are books about business, books about writing and communication, books about program and project management (eBooks not pictured), and most importantly books about change (such as, “That’s not how we do it here!”).

Dysfunctional Teams

You can see how the story builds from one conflict to the next. First, you discover that few people have a view of business planning, and even then the planning for organizational change is sometimes haphazard at best. You become aware that fewer receive much communication about where the company is going and how it is going to get there, and those affected most by change may be the least involved in the projects that are going to change their work lives. The greatest problem every business will face is “change”, especially for larger teams, but it also presents the greatest opportunity. People are your greatest asset with how dynamic we can be, but we are often change resistant for good reason too. And that’s not the main reason changes often fail. People will follow good leadership and become change advocates for good change implementations. Good employees want you, your business, and you as teammates to succeed together. The issue is most companies cannot get on the same page from top to bottom and are not well-organized to make such pivots together.

Executive & Functional Manager Learning

I have been fortunate to have gained a lot of understanding from albeit hard experience working for many years assisting executives, managing projects, and leading teams in businesses of different sizes (1-5, 5-50, 50-500, and more). I have often been the go between for executives or heads and the frontline workers for communications and company change initiatives in a flat structure with a lot of autonomy, but little authoritative sponsorship and often no middle management. I have also worked with functional managers in organizations to manage projects across departments and negotiate for employee hours with no formal structure and standard of project management put in place. It has given me great opportunities to see how work really works in most small to midsize organizations (1-500 employees) and to set Storyboard PM up differently. Executives know their area of expertise, but they need Subject Expert Specialists who can work on project teams to progress the business as a whole. Does your team really work as a team cross-functionally across all levels, especially when organizational change and improvement projects (on top of regular functional workflows) are needed?

Organizational Project Management

I have realized that most businesses need to improve their organizational project management (with adaptive strategy and tactics). Change requires projects and professional project management is the best agent for progressing work from one state to another cohesively. With teamwork the results are greater than the sum of individual parts. Only then can business professionals and businesses as a whole reach their full potential (not in silos). Project Management enables more people to gain leadership, management, and team skills by becoming project managers for the length of the project. They are able to advance their career as they advance your company. Is your organization surviving, or thriving, leading progress, or reacting to change?

Communications & Repeatable Systems

I have learned that we are all just trying to figure things out as we go. But, it has shown me a significant disconnect in the workforce. When executives are out of touch workers disengage or go rogue. A lot of knowledge and information just does not transfer or translate down the ranks (or more importantly, side to side, usually starting with the fact that there is no authorized structure for it and autonomous teams are fraught by power struggles.). Often the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing and vice versa. With no repeatable systems written down to replicate success, there is no consistency and little backup for anyone to take time off. Workers get burnt out just doing things the wrong way and dealing with the emergencies that result. Things get duplicated, missed, and reworked!

Business Maturity

I have learned that you can get a feel for the maturity of a company and its potential for growth by the state of its knowledge management and specifically how it manages projects. Most companies have industry and subject experts with “tribal knowledge” and a solid organizational structure and approach for permanent ongoing work, but do they have project experts apart from the functional managers who are not motivated to prioritize improvement projects about their primary focus and concern of just keeping their head above water so-to-speak by keeping operations going? Do they have a knowledge base? Have they standardized best practices or at least an approach (SOPs or OPAs)?

Subject Experts & Adaptability

I have found that we are all knowledge workers. The combination of our knowledge, skills, and interests uniquely qualifies us to each solve part of the puzzle when a business faces unique challenges. We should always be learning, but the greatest skill we can develop is adaptability. To adapt as a team every change initiative should be backed by professional project management. Adapt and survive, as they say. We need to learn, adapt, and grow as individuals, teams, and organizations!

Storyboard PM Solution

We can do better! That’s why I founded Storyboard PM to integrate organizational project management as a business solution that gets and keeps our business teams on the same page to progress our work together.

Let’s lift our organizational and project management maturity from one level to the next, starting with better knowledge management so we can make changes we want rather than be forced to make changes we don’t want.

Originally published at Storyboard PM, LLC