Answers.Com, Wikipedia [1] defines organisational culture as ‘comprising the attitudes, values, beliefs, norms and customs of an organisation. Whereas organisational structure is relatively easy to draw and describe, organisational culture is considered to be less tangible and more difficult to measure’. The same applies to defining what makes a project management culture. Answers.Com describes a strong culture as one where staff respond to stimulus because of their alignment with organisational (substitute project management) values. Where culture is strong people do things because they believe it is the right thing to do. If we were to take this as an indicator of a strong project management culture, within the Tasmanian Government, the TGPMF has not been mandated in any policy documents but accepted as the Tasmanian Government methodology through its application in practice.
If we were to try listing the criteria for defining a project management culture I would suggest that it would vary from organisation to organisation. The ‘evidence’ I use to make me believe we are a long way there in the Tasmanian Government is the following.
the TGPMF is not mandated but accepted across agencies;
we have high level sponsors including the Inter Agency Steering Committee (IASC), which has membership of Deputy Secretaries from all agencies;
we have an active Community of Practice that extends outside government;
senior executive within agencies expect to see projects planned and documented using the Framework;
we have a whole-of-government training pathway for project managers;
our workshops and forums are well attended (usually over 100);
agency personnel know whom to contact if they have a project management issue, not just us but project managers in other agencies, networks are alive and well;
we have two representatives from each agency on our Project Management Advisory Committee, (PMAC) and the majority consistently turn up for meetings, circulate information within their agencies and regularly provide timely feedback to us on resource development and service delivery issues;
we continue to monitor and report activities and current issues, and there is still interest in us doing so;
90 percent of large Tasmanian Government projects use our fee-for-service QA;
100 percent of large Tasmanian Government projects use our guidelines and templates;
several agencies have recently begun to look at the establishment of various forms of Project Support Office (PSO) using the TGPMF resources as the tools;
several agency Corporate Plans specifically mention having applied the TGPMF;
our team is well known across agencies and we are told we have a good reputation as being accessible and responsive;
we currently have 650 subscribers to our email list (self-subscription process);
we receive many requests to present at agency information sessions;
agency personnel return from conferences and contact us to proudly mention that ‘our’ TGPMF has been referred to;
current major projects across government – all of which include significant organisational change management challenges (OCM) – have elected to take a project approach, either by individual sets of projects or programs of projects; and most importantly
there is a sense of shared ownership of the methodology on the part of practising project managers, who feel comfortable to comment and provide feedback on what works and what does not.
With regard to helping ascertain how healthy your Project Management Culture is, Project Management Maturity models exist, and organisations can be contracted to assist in assessing the maturity level of your organisation. The Australian Institute of Project Management (AIPM) proposes one such model. It proves a little more difficult to gauge whole-of-government maturity as opposed to individual agencies. While I have focussed on whole-of-government activity in this chapter, individual Tasmanian Government agencies are obviously at differing stages with their own application of a project management discipline.
One can also join Project Management Benchmarking Networks that provide valuable insights when you are benchmarked with like organisations. Many of these opportunities we are unable to take advantage of due to budgetary constraints. We therefore try to use our networks, both interstate and overseas, to as much advantage as possible. We continually seek to share our learnings with others and to learn from them. Our standard response to a copyright request is:
Yes, with due acknowledgement, but it is ‘warts and all stuff’ and we would love to hear back from you about what you are learning about the usefulness of the resources and how they might be improved. More importantly lessons learnt from the projects you are undertaking and how these lessons might be captured and shared.
In summary, I believe we do have a healthy project management culture in the Tasmanian Government but the form it takes is probably different to how it would be seen in other State or Federal Government jurisdictions. For example, in some Commonwealth Departments it is a mammoth job to get agreement to common project management processes across individual units let alone across the whole of department or indeed government. In many cases Project Management frameworks or methodologies have to be mandated with other support activities aimed at creating the collaborative culture that will enable more than lip service to be applied. Gateway processes are gradually being implemented where projects have received large amounts of funding. I would contend that gateway processes need to be founded on particular project management methodologies. The UK uses PRINCE2 for example. It is much easier, and possibly more efficient and effective, to introduce a Gateways approach if the project management practices are sound and in place. In fact, why would we fund major change initiatives where there is no evidence of a quality project management framework within which the projects will be undertaken?