From Managing Projects to Leading Organizations

In 1938, Chester Barnard, then president of New Jersey Bell Telephone, examined organizations as cooperative systems. He asked what enables people to accomplish together what they cannot accomplish alone. Project management answers part of that question by organizing approved work: deliverables, owners, dates, and dependencies. Enterprise Readiness asks an earlier question. When a Strategic Situation demands coordinated action, have the people, authority, communication, and response sequence been prepared?

That question belongs to the enterprise, not only to its PMO. A PMO can see across investments and host the conversation. But it cannot stand in for a chief executive's judgment, a financial authorization, legal clearance, or the operating leader who must carry the response. A leadership team can run a well-governed project portfolio and still spend the first days of a new situation deciding who can act. And preparing for a situation does not remove the need to manage the projects that follow.

I saw the difference when two adjacent divisions of one organization faced the same regulatory change. One spent weeks establishing ownership and authority. The other had prepared a response for that class of situation and acted within days. This practitioner observation, explored in Chapter 12, does not show that the same preparation will work everywhere. It shows what to examine: when each division identified the situation, who could authorize the response, and what had been agreed before work began.

Stanley McChrystal's account of changing an organization for speed offers a related example of shared understanding and distributed authority set in advance. It does not validate this book's model, but it clarifies the management question. Leadership can build the conditions for cooperation before a particular demand arrives. The PMO can contribute its cross-functional view where it has one. Another organization may place that stewardship elsewhere. The aim is to make preparation an enterprise capability, not one more task for a delivery function to absorb.

A project creates value through the work it delivers. Preparation can also leave something behind: clearer decision rights, a tested communication sequence, and learning the next response can use. Chapter 5 follows one Strategic Situation through the points where that preparation could make a difference.