Communicating Project Management

A Participatory Rhetoric for Development Teams

Benjamin Lauren

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351694780
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Communication & Public Speaking

Communicating Project Management argues that the communication practices of project managers have necessarily become participatory, made up of complex strategies and processes solidly grounded in rhetorical concepts. The book draws on case studies across organizational contexts and combines individual experiences to investigate how project management relies on communication as teams develop products, services, and internal processes. The case studies also provide examples of how project managers can be understood and studied as writers, further arguing project managers must approach communication as designed experience that must be intentionally inclusive. Author Benjamin Lauren illustrates to readers how teams work together to manage projects through complex coordinative communication practices, and highlights how project managers are constantly learning and evolving by analyzing where they succeed and fail. He concludes that technical and professional communicators have a pivotal role in supporting and facilitating participative approaches to communicating project management.

1
DECENTRALIZATION AND PROJECT MANAGEMENT

Communication in an organization … is not a means of organization. It is the mode of organization.

(Drucker, 2009, p. 267, emphasis in original)

There is no one best way to organize. The right structure depends on prevailing circumstances and considers an organization’s goals, strategies, technology, people, and environment. Understanding the complexity and variety of design possibilities can help create formal prototypes that work for, rather than against, both people and collective purposes.

(Bolman & Deal, 2013, p. 67)

After losing to the Dallas Mavericks in the 2011 NBA finals, Miami Heat Coach Erik Spoelstra spent his off season rethinking the team’s offense. Spoelstra spoke with a number of renowned sports coaches, but it was after talking with Chip Kelly (at that time the Head Coach of the Oregon Ducks college football team) that he developed the idea of the “pace and space” offense that eventually helped propel the Heat to back-to-back championships in 2012 and 2013. Spoelstra wanted the team to play at a fast pace—to change the rhythm of the game in ways that would take advantage of the players’ athleticism. To make that kind of space, he wanted the team to spread out across the floor because it would empower them to be creative—to read and react to what was presented by an opponent’s defensive scheme. For a pace and space offense to work, the coaching staff had to prepare players to make good decisions. Coaches also had to let go of more traditional ways of controlling the team, such as always calling a timeout during the final moments of a close game. A pace and space offense can also be characterized as a decentralized approach to managing teams because it empowers players to make decisions based on their read of the moment, and as a result, the team is held accountable to each other for mistakes or poor choices.

At many organizations and institutions, comparable forms of decentralization have become so pervasive that they have changed the work of development teams and the implementation of project management communication. In many ways, decentralized decision-making at the managerial level is used to produce the same sort of outcomes Spoelstra wanted for the Heat. For example, decentralization is used to create a faster rhythm for project work, to make space for creativity and innovation, to avoid micromanaging decisions, to empower teams to innovate on their strengths, and to make people accountable to each other. The goal of this chapter is to explain how decentralization provides an important context for understanding project managers as writers. This chapter explains the impact of decentralization on teams and teaming, project management methodologies, and project managers in general. The chapter begins with a more detailed explanation of decentralization and contrasts it with centralization. Then, the chapter explains how decentralization has influenced development work. The chapter continues by discussing how project management methodologies were developed from scientific management to support decentralized ways of organizing work. The chapter ends by overviewing the effects of decentralization on communication at the project level of organizations.

Decentralization

The structure of an organization often depends on its size and its business goals. Organizations with thousands of employees must decentralize managerial control as no single person or group could realistically oversee the work of each person in the company. On the other hand, start-ups with just ten employees may not need to decentralize decision-making and control for the company to meet its goals, unless it is positioned as a strategy for growing or evolving a business. At root, decentralization is about structuring an organization to delegate control (or decision-making) to other units or teams. Such organizational structures are not limited to businesses, however. Democratic governments, like the United States, generally operate under a decentralized model. Elected officials at the state or local level proceed over laws and regulations in each state, county, province, or city. In these instances, those in power are expected to involve people in decisions about legislation, regulations, elections, and services (or they may be voted out of office).

Decentralization can be contrasted with centralization, which is a more concentrated form of decision-making and control. Centralization tends to grant power for decision-making and control with a single person or group. While some might bristle at the idea of a single decision-maker because of the power implications, centralization has practical applications that are useful for many organizations and institutions. For instance, a judge oversees hearings to ensure the law is interpreted and followed appropriately. Yet, in the context of organizations that develop products and services, management centralization and decentralization can be understood as points on a continuum, not an either/or classification. Mintzberg (2013) detailed this continuum from maximal (mostly centralized control) to minimal managing (mostly decentralized control) (see pp. 102–107), noting that the management extremes at either end of the continuum can exist, but are not common. That is, many organizations are purposefully structured with both centralized and decentralized forms of control and decision-making in different units or departments. As a result, an organization’s use of decentralization is generally strategic and practical, meant to help a business meet fiscal, productivity, or quality benchmarks.

As a mechanism for oversight and management, decentralization also enables organizations to scale, making it easier to acquire new companies that have their own management team. As well, it helps organizations hire remote or distributed employees. When a company decentralizes decision-making and control to different groups inside the organization, the structure forwarded suggests flatter hierarchies and less oversight will improve productivity, quality, and/or efficiency. There are a range of case studies about how decentralization functions in different workplace contexts. For example, Richards and Culp (2001) described how the Richards Group decentralized to encourage a culture of creativity and innovative thinking, while Brafman and Beckstrom (2006) provided a series of case studies about how the internet facilitated more radical forms of leaderless decentralization, such as file-sharing and other online communities.¹ In the latter, organization of people relied heavily on technology and on the motivation of those participating in the communities to self-organize around a given topic or interest.

Conceptually, decentralization draws from a systems approach to organizing work. In a systems approach, management of organizations is achieved through understanding relationships and processes holistically instead of separating companies into individual parts or units (Ackoff, Addison, and Carey, 2010). A good example of a systems view of management in practice is demonstrated by organizational charts. Organizational charts show how companies operate as an interconnected, hierarchical system. Figure 1.1 illustrates a traditional organizational hierarchy. To make decentralization work, managers use reporting meetings and schedule regular “check-ins” to discuss ongoing work, particularly to problem-solve specific obstacles of interest to upper management. The degree to which decentralization and centralization oscillates in organizational hierarchies is highly dependent on company culture, business goals and mission, and the kinds of problems that surface.

If we compare Figure 1.1 to Figure 1.2, there is a clear difference in the intended hierarchy. In Figure 1.2, the hierarchy of the system is much flatter, and so power is decentralized. Everyone, aside from the owner of the company, exists on the same level. There are many examples of companies today that use both approaches successfully in theory, but as systems thinking reminds us, every hierarchy produces certain behaviors that influence the way decentralization and centralization are practiced. In other words, Figure 1.1 and 1.2 demonstrate how companies organize to decentralize decision-making and control, but the figures do not capture the social factors of organization, such as company culture. An organizational chart cannot capture how decentralization is implemented or how it propagates relationships across implied hierarchies of influence and creates alliances across groups of people. However, project managers often have a unique view of these conflicting hierarchies and social systems.

FIGURE 1.1 Traditional Organizational Hierarchy

FIGURE 1.2 Flat Organizational Hierarchy

Decentralization is an important starting point for our inquiry into communicating project management because it introduces what has become a common work structure for development teams. Decentralization also helps to explain why writing is so important to the work of project managers. Structures alone cannot cultivate participation across all the different audiences at work. Winsor’s (2003) work extensively documented the power relationships present in the mechanisms and artifacts used by managers, particularly demonstrating how they used specific genres to reinforce their positions of power. And, as Bolman and Deal concluded:

A team structure emphasizing hierarchy and top-down control tends to work well for simple, stable tasks. As work becomes more complex or the environment gets more turbulent, structure must also develop more multifaceted and lateral forms of communication and coordination.

(Bolman & Deal, 2013, p. 112)

Project management, often made up of learning and knowledge-making and relating communication activities, can certainly be described as complex because so much of it is nonlinear, which can appear messy. Project managers tend to communicate most often through and around the work of development teams in the role of mediator and advocate.

Decentralized Development Teams

Many of today’s technology companies have expanded operations across the world in part to be competitive in the global economy, and to take advantage of a global talent pool. For these organizations, decentralization is a way of survival. In globally distributed companies, for instance, teams are comprised of people who may live in different regions, think in different languages, and work in office spaces with vastly different social dynamics. Alone, the challenges of working across such distance is difficult, but when teams self-organize across such cultural and physical distance, another layer of complexity is added to communication and participation (see Brewer, 2015). Operating in such complex circumstances results in many organizations and institutions decentralizing control to departments, divisions, and teams out of necessity. By control, I mean “the mechanism through which the operations of an organization are coordinated to achieved desired results” (Yates, 1989, p. xvi). Project management activity often works to control the scope of a project (the work that will and will not be done). It also controls other project-related tools and resources, such as content management systems, schedules, budgets, meetings, development methodologies, and so on. To support coordinating the work of globally distributed teams, decentralization is indeed useful.

Control over team processes and procedures is essential to project management practice, but decentralization influences how control is communicated. As teams share in control of project management activities, a more democratic process of decision-making theoretically takes hold. To help show how this democratic process works, Spinuzzi (2015) explained that traditional command-and-control approaches to managing these teams may not be useful. Rather, he cited Malone (2004) to argue these teams may better respond to coordinate-and-cultivate approaches (Spinuzzi, 2015, Chapter 2, Section 5, para. 6). Coordinating, in this instance, means communicating in ways that help people share infor mation in reliable and efficient ways. Cultivating, on the other hand, means communicating as a facilitator of project work, such as arranging meetings, developing action plans, or soliciting feedback. Decentralized teams that share in project management activities require different kinds of support. Sometimes the support is finding an automated system that help keep teams organized. In other instances, shared control is achieved through co-writing project documents, like charters.

While managers in the 1900s believed that decentralization had the potential to breed satisfaction at work (Yates, 1989), the autonomy it provides also positions organizations to rethink how to support decentralized project teams. No doubt the affordances of mobile technology and the internet support innovative approaches to communicating project management through information communication technologies. Brown (2009) and many others have explained how the decentralized nature of the internet forces companies to rethink how organizations structure work in general. Thus, decentralization is useful for organizations from a functional standpoint because it affords employees the ability to manage their own schedules, which is useful for companies with many divisions and projects. In other instances, decentralization can be implemented as a flattened structure for cultivating innovation and creativity to help develop new products or services, or to solve particularly challenging problems. In this way, the mobile affordances of the internet also contribute to how project managers communicate to support decentralized work.

Even so, decentralized teams can sometimes be criticized for being trendy or even unnecessary. For example, Mintzberg (2013) essentially suggests that decentralized power is an illusion because executive managers can always take control back. As well, Goldratt and Cox (2014) explain that companies seem to go through a constant process of centralization and decentralization, referring to these organizational shifts an ever turning “merry-go-round” (p. 285) that starts by

arranging the company according to product lines and then changing it according to functional capabilities and—vice versa. Deciding that the company is wasting too much money on duplicated efforts and thus moving to a more centralized mode. Ten years later, we want to encourage entrepreneurship and we move back to decentralization. Almost every big company is oscillating, every five or ten years from centralization to decentralization, and then back again.

(Goldratt & Cox, 2014, p. 286)

Treating centralization and decentralization as an ongoing process perhaps suggests self-organizing is more of a trend than a transformation—a recycling of ideas that we see organizations and institutions engage in on a regular basis. And not every organization uses self-organizing teams for all their work. As explained earlier, decentralization is not an all-or-nothing phenomenon. But, many organizations use it for certain kinds of work and activities. Specifically, decentralization has had an important effect on how development projects get managed and are organized.

Goldratt and Cox (2014) also characterize decentralized teams as entrepreneurial. At the organizational level, the term used to describe entrepreneurial work is intrapreneurial. Intrapreneurial approaches are useful for helping organizations innovate from the periphery (Antoncic & Hisrich, 2003). We’ve seen companies like Google offer programs like “20% time,” where employees are granted one-fifth of their work hours to innovate and develop th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1 Decentralization and Project Management
• 2 Rethinking the Paradigm of Project Management: From Efficiency to Participative
• 3 Communicating to Make Space for Participation: Locating Agency in Project Communication
• 4 On Site with The Gardener and The Chef: Project Leadership and Communication
• 5 Managing A Reorganization Project at DTI: Participation and Making Space for Communicating Change
• 6 Conclusion: A Participatory Rhetoric for Development Teams
• Index