PROJECT MANAGERS OR AGENTS OF CHANGE?

2020 AND COVID-19 PROVIDED A STARK REMINDER THAT WE LIVE IN AN AGE BESET BY THE CHALLENGES OF TECHNOLOGICAL ADVANCEMENT, DIGITAL DISRUPTION, AND INCREASINGLY TURBULENT ENVIRONMENTS.

To sustainably compete in such environments, organisations require an innate capability to constantly readjust to this disequilibrium, uncertainty, and ambiguity – effectively having the ability to maintain a ‘fit’ between the organisation and the external environment. The core proposition is that matching the organisation with the external environment will lead to superior performance (or conversely poor performance provides an indirect indicator of a lack of organisational competence and / or external environment misfit).

When it comes to achieving an alignment between the organisation and the external environment, one key factor management has direct control over is strategy. The argument is that the organisation and the environment can interact in a dynamic co-alignment, and if the ‘right’ choices are made, the resulting ‘fit’ has positive implications for performance.

Contemporary academic research refers to this ability to change and maintain ‘fit’ as ‘dynamic capability’, which “… is the capacity of an organisation to purposefully create, extend, or modify its resource base”. This dynamic change is not synonymous with change but rather one type of change aimed at the intentional reconfiguration of an organisation’s resource base – the resource base being the source of an organisation’s day-to-day operational capability to earn its ‘living’ by producing and selling products or services.

By extension, if operational capabilities are the systems of infrastructure employed by an organisation to earn a ‘living’, and dynamic capabilities are a ‘force’ applied to the resource base to enact a change, we could deduce that the successful delivery of projects would be one form of dynamic capability. Or, projects are vehicles for change and project managers could be better defined as agents of change – Australia’s strategic commitment to the Snowy 2.0 project, which seeks to change the existing infrastructure to secure a stable low-carbon emissions power source, may be such an example.

There are several factors which moderate whether or not dynamic capabilities are successful but a key contingent element is specifically the role of management (or project manager). Project managers are a critical determinant in the development and sustainability of dynamic capabilities where, to some extent, dynamic capabilities reside in the organisation’s strategic project management capabilities. This exists in a project manager’s attitudes and skills, how they coordinate and integrate activities, how they develop new ways to work, and carry out reconfiguration in response to environmental changes. As illustrated below there are several factors that moderate a project manager’s expertise in the deployment of dynamic capabilities.

Model of dynamic (project management) capability development based on the experiences of top management and career knowledge.

(Adapted from: Lee, 2018)

1. First, project managers can be limited by their reality where their ‘know-how’ is narrowly constrained by what has been experienced in the past; where they operate according to mindsets formed through years of experience and as a consequence they are unable to work in new ways congruent with the rapidly changing environment.

2. Second, it is also important to consider how project managers learn and acquire new skills and capabilities – in this capacity, ‘knowing-why’ and the ability to engender trust, to take risk and create an organisational learning culture, plays a critical role in how organisations evolve their dynamic project management capabilities.

3. Finally, a project manager with more varied ‘know-whom’ expertise and knowledge is more likely to identify required changes quickly and / or changes within the organisation that require new approaches. A lack of appropriate project management experiences may result in limited cognitive frameworks or templates to address unfamiliar situations or new settings. This may result in slow responses, implying project managers are unable to interpret the meaning of information regarding unfamiliar business situations, and as a result compromise the dynamic response.

From this, we can argue that project managers are key enablers or inhibitors who moderate the successful deployment of dynamic capabilities and are the pivotal gate keepers in implementing strategic change. Dynamic project managers should therefore consider how they position themselves as ‘agents of change’. Fundamentally the skills required are an ability to sense and shape opportunities and threats, which is a managerial characteristic to be able to recognise any environmental disequilibrium and exercise measures to take advantage of it (or even create disequilibrium), as well as seize opportunities which is the ability to initiate projects to take advantage of opportunities or mitigate threats and make investment decisions.

Author: George Scott, a Certified Practicing Project Director, has delivered a wide range of infrastructure and minerelated projects globally, as well as across Australia. This has covered all investment phases including business planning, scope development, detailed design, project planning, plan delivery as well as construction. George is a Manager with BHP managing major capital studies and other business improvement initiatives.