From the course: Project Management Foundations

How organizational culture affects projects

From the course: Project Management Foundations

How organizational culture affects projects

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- Organizational culture is a set of factors that guide people's behaviors and decisions within an organization. Things like shared values, beliefs, assumptions, habits, and language. Let's talk about how organizational culture affects projects. The organization's mission and vision shape the organization's culture. Projects that support the company mission are likely to get more attention and resources. When you're faced with a tricky decision, you can use the mission to determine the best thing to do. Leadership and authority are also a big part of organizational culture. If management defines clear goals and then delegates responsibility to employees, that approach will also work in your projects. On the other hand, if authority isn't handed out often, you need to work with management to get things done and build their trust in you at the same time. Another aspect of culture is the organization's work environment. With a positive environment, people are motivated to get things done, and gathering lessons learned is relatively easy because employees are used to providing input and striving to improve. In a negative environment, you're probably going to have to spend a lot of time managing your team. Some cultures believe in following the rules no matter what, other cultures nurture innovation, expecting employees to try new approaches, question what's been done before, and come up with better methods. You don't have to follow the rules in a rules-based culture but if you're thinking about breaking rules, it's important to know which ones you can break, and also think about what you'll do if your nonstandard approach doesn't work. Does your organization put results ahead of procedures or vice versa? That is, is it better to follow the rules even if you don't achieve the objective, or can you do whatever it takes as long as you deliver the desired results? A project's goal is always to achieve its objectives but it's important to know where the boundaries are in making things happen. Change management can be affected by organizational culture. If the organization is risk averse, change management might include multiple rounds of review and require approval from several people. On the other hand, if change is viewed simply as life in the project management world, change management might be a lot simpler. With people working in locations around the country or the world, you also need to consider the cultures of your team members. People may react differently to situations or communicate differently based on the norms of their cultures. For example, in some cultures, people are taught not to show weakness and that behavior could be interpreted as arrogance by people from other cultures. Culture has a strong influence on how things happen within projects and how decisions are made. To increase your success, you need to manage your projects, taking cultural factors into account

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