Unity within diversity: social effects on project efficacy
Resumo
We describe a performance gap in project management standards and pose the question, 'What is the best methodology for addressing this gap?' The purpose of our exploration is to measure the relationship between social factors and project performance as a function of two variables; unity and diversity. The general objective is to define the gap through the lens of our philosophical worldview and apply a methodology for measuring it. In so doing, we seek to raise awareness of the importance of a projects social performance as a success criteria. Using a theoretical social health model as our tool, we quantify the social performance potential of a case study project environment as a numeric measurement. Ethnography and a mixed method approach focus attention on context and its synthesis of findings. Findings identify improvements in people processes which can be applied to the practices and procedures of global practitioners. Specifically, we refer to social engineering improvements in the planning, executing, and monitoring processes. Our analysis of the model’s output was largely supportive of the performance findings of the case study environment. However, it revealed some technical flaws in the models structure requiring improvement. First, refinements are needed to account for imbalances in individual nodal weights based on systemic failures, which put performance potential at risk. Second, our measurement of performance potential challenges the traditional criteria of project success. Based on the findings, we describe a scenario where social design may well be incompatible with the widely accepted definition of project success. We must then consider what is more costly. Changing an organizations culture, or redefining success according to the performance potential of the organization encountered.
