Organizational culture: The Process Dimension

To be effective within an organization, the IT manager needs to understand the organization, deeply. Experience (and grey hairs) give an IT manager the tools for understanding and synthesizing an organization’s culture both to function effectively within it, and to chart out and implement any changes that are both needed and feasible.

What is “Organizational Culture”
Organizational culture is the personality of the organization, and as in people, personality is deeply ingrained and not at all easily changed. Culture is the aggregation of behaviors, values, beliefs, norms and tangible signs of organization staff behaviors. Certainly the industry plays a part, as well as staff and location diversity, as well as the organization’s stories. A simple look at the “Help, About Us” on a company’s website can provide telling insights. While there are many ways to examine the culture of an organization for the moment let’s consider the cultural compatibility with a process orientation.

The reluctant organization
There exists a world-view that process is simply bureaucratic overhead that gets in the way of actual work. Amazingly in today’s day and age there exists organizations and pockets of IT that have inculcated this belief system. Symptoms include endless fire-drills and wringing the last bits of overtime out of beleaguered staffers under increasing stress and pressure. Introduction of process from the bottom-up is destined to fail. Such organizations find they cannot scale up, suffer high-turnover, and inconsistent quality. 3,000 years ago King Solomon writing under a pen-name once said “What is truly crooked cannot be straightened”, which is as applicable as ever. As long as this weltanschauung (world-view) radiates from the top of the organization, the organization will not change. As the wry Russian expression states “The fish rots from the head”.

Auto-industry
Let’s briefly examine the evolution of the post-war automobile industry. The concepts of creating a science out of production by instituting systematic process with solid statistical foundations were being charted by the two great men W. Edwards Deming and Joseph Duran. U.S. companies rejected the concepts, but Japanese manufacturers adopted the principles, leading Japan to reverse their reputation for shoddy goods, and ultimately overshadow the U.S. car industry by adapting and implementing TQM (Total Quality Management). This exemplifies the power of rigorous process, as well as the feasibility of organizational cultural change, when the will to change and top-level support exists.

How to read an Organization’s culture
Before taking on a role within a company where you will drive process (such project management, program management, audit, PMO), first look for the clues of acceptance. Here’s what to look for and some probing questions to ask:

The Hercules Mythology
When an organization collects and nurtures irreplaceable people, it can be indicative of poor cross-training, lack of delegation, and possibly staff that become unmanageable as they start to develop a sense of self-importance that be caustic to staff morale. One symptom of this are myths around key individuals that typically include herculean efforts. Often people eager to achieve this kind of stardom allow problems to fester until a crisis develop, so they can pull an “all nighter” to “save the day”. Staff can become addicted to the adrenaline rush, leading to avoidable crises.

Organizational hierarchy
A strict hierarchy, with command/control, and no cross-silo collaboration can indicate duplication within each department, and lack of communication that creates avoidable waste. When taken to an extreme, this organization structure often is associated with the philosophy that “management knows best” and often is exhibited with overworked managers, and staffers with insufficient information to be effective.

Beliefs around past failures
Why has the organization failed in the past? If the answers are around having the wrong people, then the belief system is that hiring the right people will solve the problem. Such organizations may have to overpay to hire overqualified individuals, who through brute force achieve goals, yet do so in an unpredictable and irreproducible fashion.

Scapegoats
High turnover is another symptom that a core organizational belief is that the organization would achieve greatness if only they had the right people. Consistently high turnover over time raises the question of whether the problem is the people, or the organization. A similar symptom is consistently high turnover for one job or role. This can indicate that a role is set up for failure and cannot possibly succeed. One wonders if this adage can be applied to organizations as well as people “one definition of insanity is doing the same activity repeatedly, yet expecting a different outcome”.

Overtime
Is overtime common? Overtime may be used to compensate for poor estimation, overoptimistic commitments, poor and rapidly changing prioritization. Overtime is common in IT, but one needs to be aware that one can work 10%, 20% even 30% overtime, but cannot increase productivity by 200% or more. Plus overtime is self-defeating, as staff productivity will degrade due to impacted morale and sleep deprivation.

Lessons learned
Does the organization engage in any kind of post-mortem or lessons learned exercise after a project? No matter how informal or inconsistently applied, such a practice within an organization gives hope that in its desire to learn, it acknowledges there are indeed lessons to learn, and ways to work better, opening the possibility of gradually introducing a process orientation.

Summary
In summary, a process orientation in a corporate culture is not just a recipe for quality, consistency and scalability, but is a foundation for organization and personal success, and may well be a core competitive competency, and barrier to competition and market entry for less enlightened organizations.