W.L. Gore & Associates Case Study
A highly successful manufacturing corporation opens its doors to the Project Management Consulting Group for help, one of only a handful of external advisory entities allowed behind the scenes of this exceptionally private company in decades. The result: new project management capabilities and improved time-to-market for new products.
Overview
This company is a multibillion dollar, multinational research and product development firm with over four thousand technical, scientific, and administrative employees across its major manufacturing locations. The organization’s unique corporate culture encourages employee collaboration in a very flat, non-managerial environment where each employee is expected to define his or her own job function and ensure the success of product development and sales within the marketplace. Whilst quite successful with its product lines and sales, the company frequently missed introducing new products at major trade shows or came to market after a competitor had already introduced a similar product. A team of employees recognized that there were opportunities to shorten the product development lifecycle and introduce products into the marketplace in a more timely fashion. As the company did not have a formal project management discipline or competency established, it looked to the Project Strategy Consulting Group – a Project Management Institute Registered Consultancy – to assist it with understanding how project management practices could be embedded within the company’s unique culture.
Outcomes
By carefully examining good practices existent across the organization, the consultants were able to suggest a course of improvement that would be more likely to be readily accepted by the organization’s employees. While the organization is still undergoing its improvement initiative, it is already realizing results in employee satisfaction with having better tools and methods available to ensure the success of their projects. The company has been so pleased with the Project Strategy Consulting Group’s work that it has been invited back twice to work on additional business improvement efforts.
Summary
While not a formal competency, the management of projects does occur within the organization, to varying degrees of efficacy depending on a wide variety of factors. The consulting team determined that PMI’s OPM3® would be the appropriate maturity model to best understand both how the organization is performing its project practices and what missing elements would be most appropriate to consider to help the organization incrementally improve its maturity. OPM3 provides the ability to examine multiple dimensions of organizations, allowing the consultants to analyze differences in practice behaviors across continents and lines of business. In doing so, areas where practices are more mature could be quickly identified and examined further to ascertain if those practices could be more readily leveraged across the remainder of the organization. The consultants also leveraged the model’s ability to examine program management, product development, and portfolio management, as well as perform an analysis of organizational enablers which lend support to, or detract from, the ability of the company’s practitioners to effectually manage their project endeavors.
