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Project Charters Bridge Cultures

Take great pride and care in your project charter because this is where you sow the good seed. It will eventually take care of you. Buy a high-quality leather-bound portfolio -- the kind graphic artists use to highlight their best work. In this portfolio, you keep an original example of a very important project document – the project charter. Why? The leather-bound portfolio demonstrates to everyone the value that you place in this document. The PMBOK Guide® describes a project charter mainly in terms of what it can do for the project. Perhaps just as important, however, is what this document can do for you. If your employer allows you to keep this document, take your leather-bound portfolio to your job interviews. It will demonstrate to your future employer that a charter is a high priority.

I believe the project charter is an excellent tool to overcome personal adversity, even cultural gaps. Many organizations have recognized that project management is a key competency that is needed to help meet the business strategy. Let’s consider at some examples of how the project charter can help bridge cultural gaps.

Project Selection and Chartering
The project charter when applied according to the PMBOK Guide is an important document to any project as it is your badge to start a project and use company resources. However, majority of the organizations do not recognize this and value its importance. This may be due to the culture and structure of the society.

Let us take a look at the Middle East. Many countries in this region are still monarchies, where kings, amirs or sheikhs rule. These nobles often engage in businesses and other commercial activities. Due to their wealth, these men or their families become majority share holders of many companies.

One of the major products of the Middle East is oil. Oil generates a lot of revenue thereby requiring the availability of a sophisticated banking system. Financial institutions such as banks are always lucrative business. In the Middle East, banks are competing for the bulk of the market. This leads to various I.T. and business projects. Almost all of these projects are initiated without the use of proper project management methodologies or processes. One important element which is never present in any of the projects is the project charter. Due to the absence of the charter, projects either fail or abandoned without any accountability.

Ad Hoc Project Management Methods
Several banks in the region run projects using ad hoc methods. Bank A uses the strong arm method. The chairman goes down and talks directly to the project team, which is composed of business and technology people. He simply tells them that he does not want any changes made for any of the other stakeholders. He simply wants the project completed on time and on budget. Any existing business process should change based on the capability of the product/ software. The existence of a formal chartering process could have prevented the chairman from using arm-twisting techniques thereby resulting to a more relaxed project.

Bank B on the other hand, is being micro-managed by the majority shareholder who belongs to the royal family. He initiates projects without business cases, without approval of the business units affected, and even without the approval of the CEO or the chairman of the board. He goes down to the grass root level and gives instructions to anyone and everyone. In many cases, the projects will continue for more than two years. After two years, the vendor will miss deadlines due to the continuously changing scope of the project. Eventually, he will terminate the project due to the failure of the current vendor to implement on his target dates and start with another vendor on the same project. If there was a project charter, the scope could have been better defined and the project completed in one cycle with minimum waste of resources. Additionally, the business units will be bound to cooperate because they would have own some of the activities stated in the charter.

Bank C is more structured. The projects are backed by the CEO. However, the business units are being muscled into supporting the project which is spearheaded by the CEO’s protégé who happens to be the CIO. This is a politically charged environment. The business units are forced to support the effort. However, these same business units refuse to own or have accountability on any of the project activities. Bank C hired a systems integrator (SI) in an attempt to mitigate possible set backs in the projects and to help its PMO manage the projects, gather requirements, and implement a new banking system. This situation stemmed from the fact that the business units refused to support the program office established by the CIO to manage and run the projects.

The SI however, is perceived to be of no value by the internal staffs of bank C; both business and technical. The leadership of bank C thinks that by having the SI they will have less resistance from the bank on this change and hopefully have some security buffer for failure. This approach however, is not solid because the process (project lifecycle) was not bought by the internal staffs in the first place. The value of a PMO and project management was not seen in this case. If there was a project charter, Bank C could have saved millions of dollars in this project as the need for a SI would become very limited; unlike the current scenario where the SI duplicated the PMO structure of the client. Internal staff could have been bound by their commitment stated in the charter. The project scope could have also been addressed properly through the charter and lastly, the PM can focus on getting the project to complete successfully rather than getting busy on the negative politics of the environment.

As you can see, none of the projects of these three banks had a formal project charter. Their projects are chaotic and it is difficult to see or enforce any accountability.

How a Formal Charter Could Improve These Projects
The presence of the formal chartering process could have helped the banks chose the right project and allocate resources properly, hopefully with less resistance. The charter would put proper communication in place and would leave no room for misunderstanding. The presence of a formal charter could have given the project manager the power to oversee the successful completion of the project with the clearly stated project scope. These organizations will be more focused with the existence of a project charter. It is also embarrassing to keep on announcing to the organization that you are going live with a certain system and keep on missing the deadlines because of so many critical issues affecting quality. This situation surely tarnishes your credibility and integrity as a project or program manager.

In many cases, one person makes a decision in a large corporation without regard to the human resource. They fail to realize that any wasted effort of their employees will impact people and organization in many ways. This situation leads to people not giving their best to the effort and a lack of accountability.

The Middle East is a melting pot of many cultures; Indians, Americans, British, Russians, Belarusians, Chinese, Koreans, Arabs, etc. Although English is the main business language, I have seen miscommunications due to cultural interpretation. The presence of a chartering process aims to close cultural gaps between the people (it being multi-national) and the organization. The presence of a chartering process will eliminate the issue of nationality. Some Asian nationalities have been stereotype and others feel that they are more superior than the other staffs. This creates confusion in terms of responsibility. People easily gets away by simply blaming others because there is no written process that determines who does what.

Advantage of a Formal Chartering Process
A formal charter eliminates the communication barriers brought about by position, technical expertise or simply by status in the society. Remember that some members of the royal family are in the organization and the only people that have access to them are the senior management. Most of the time this level of management fails to convey the actual requirement to the project team. With the chartering process in place, communication will be clear as most of the time they will be written and will not be open to misinterpretations.

A chartering process should be developed to help choose and manage projects properly. When major communication barriers exist, as I experienced in the Middle East, it is necessary to consider the following issues:
1. Senior management must agree and accept the importance of doing a project that is in-line with the corporate strategy.
2. Form a project selection committee comprise of representatives of C-level managers.
3. This committee will make recommendations to the senior management which projects should be undertaken. The project should be justified and should be in line with the organization business strategy.
4. A sponsor must be selected. The sponsor can create the formal charter document, or he can simply send an email to the selected project manager stating what he wants done. Otherwise, the PM will never be recognized and he will not get the cooperation of the resources needed. He will spend a lot of time firefighting instead of managing the project.

Final Analysis
Implementing a formal chartering process may cause resistance, especially from personnel who use their position to manipulate the leadership. Opponents of the change may try to subvert the process. It may also initially demoralize key people who think they are in control of the situation, but who will no longer be in charge, because the charter should clearly state who is in charge. This can be resolved if the leadership has the political will to do the right thing. We should be particularly attentive to political risks in the organization. This is a process change that may lead to resistance and therefore these political risks should be mitigated. People may threaten to leave, especially those handling critical parts of the system or business.

At the end of the day, the leadership will have to make clear to all the people in the organization what the purpose of the chartering process is. The people should be made to understand that the project charter is a promise that binds all the team members in overseeing the successful completion of a project. We should also should make sure that the rank and file in the organization understand the importance of the charter to the organization. Finally, the leadership may have to be ready to take decisive actions to get things moving should the situation require it.

Randy Tango, PMP

Randy Tangco has 15 years of I.T. experience in the banking and payment card industry (VISA, Mastercard and Amex implementations). He served in various capacity including system and application support and management, computer operations support management, ATM (cash machine) deployment and management, technical lead, business support manager, and project manager while working with international banks in the middle east.

Randy, with a Bachelor’s degree in Information Technology, is the current newsletter editor of the PMI IT and Telecom Special Interest Group and the assistant newsletter editor of the PMI Tulsa Chapter.