In several of our consulting assignments we have found that project organizations were too focused on discipline and specialty excellence and did not put enough emphasis on the inter-discipline communication for project delivery – albeit obviously the most effective improvement would have been found there. This new White Paper 2013-05 “Improving Communication and Synergy between Disciplines: the Way to Project Delivery Excellence” explores the topic from the perspective of where the emphasis needs to be in terms of organizational development.
The result of non-communicating disciplines
Organizations often tend to focus on improving each discipline with the hope of getting each discipline to deliver more reliably. It does not work, or at best produces only marginal improvements. In particular for complex projects, the key is not in improving each step of the process. It is in improving the communication between all the steps. Even if each discipline is super-efficient, but they don’t communicate, the overall effectiveness will be very limited!
Investing to improve single disciplines is easy. Specialists will know what to do to improve the efficiency of their discipline. Improving all disciplines to the point where they follow the world-class processes of their discipline will be expensive as there are many disciplines involved – but it can be done.
Investing to improve communication between disciplines during project execution is hard. It takes creativity to find the right way, and it requires customized tools and changes to the arrangement of office space and behaviors.
What should you invest in? If your project-oriented organization is executing complex projects and is plagued by a lack of communication, invest in communication first. For the same effort and cost the result will be incomparably more effective, bringing your organization to the next level in terms of project success.
Read our new White Paper 2013-05 “Improving Communication and Synergy between Disciplines: the Way to Project Delivery Excellence” to understand better this key insight into the workings of project organizations.
