Sustaining your corporate culture can be a challenge. Companies mature, leadership teams change, and busy workloads make it tough to focus on anything other than daily tasks.
With support from an experienced project portfolio management consulting team to ensure your implementation is successful, you can use your portfolio to reinforce your corporate culture and nurture it even as your business evolves.
1 – Align initiatives with the culture you desire
A robust portfolio management strategy enables you to build your corporate culture by deliberately supporting projects that align with your values. An organization seeking to develop a stronger culture of teamwork, for example, may structure its portfolio to prioritize efforts that create and embrace team-based workspaces, that integrate collaborative technologies, and that help bring people together in a positive way.
2 – Unite employees around shared goals
Unless staff members are directly impacted by a project, they may never know of its existence. This makes it difficult to nurture a unifying culture and could leave some groups on the sidelines. The project portfolio is a wonderful way to give your workforce into their shared efforts and objectives, strengthening their ties to everything the company hopes to accomplish. As employees see their colleagues working on important projects and helping the business grow, your corporate culture receives a boost from those common bonds.
3 – Encourage employee participation
Workers are less likely to take an interest in your company culture if they don’t feel they’re involved in the process of achieving success. Along with their day-to-day tasks, it’s important they’re able to participate in helping the business make progress on a higher level. By soliciting employees’ feedback at various stages in the project lifecycle, your overall portfolio offers them the chance to weigh in on how well initiatives are executed, what types of projects they feel would benefit the organization, and where opportunities to improve might be lurking.
4 – Celebrate your organization’s wins
Enjoying successful outcomes is a core part of building employees’ morale, boosting job satisfaction, and maintaining their engagement through challenging times. Your portfolio management methodology should provide visibility into achievements and areas of strong performance, and you can use this insight to congratulate stakeholders and supporting partners on their great work. Important cost-saving metrics, notable production capability improvements, the growth of the organization’s knowledgebase in key areas, and revenue gains are also good opportunities to celebrate.
5 – Develop your workforce around your culture
Another benefit of a well-managed project portfolio is the long-term strategic planning it enables you to do. Looking ahead, what sort of people will contribute to the culture you want to develop and nurture? If your portfolio is heavy on global growth, you can recruit workers with targeted experience to help support that endeavor. Or perhaps your portfolio places an emphasis on innovation. Your HR team might seek out candidates with skills and expertise in that area. By knowing where you want to go and using your project portfolio as a guide, you can put the right people in place to make your vision a reality.
6 – Show your commitment to the company’s strategic mission
Some companies engrave their mission on a plaque and hang it in the lobby, but they don’t use it as a guide in doing business or assigning resources. Your project portfolio can be a hugely valuable tool in demonstrating that the executive team is fully devoted to the company’s mission. Whether it’s making a positive impact on the local community or being a leader in the industry, your portfolio gives you an avenue to consciously apply resources—time, money, and expertise—to your mission.
PMAlliance, Inc uses a team of highly experienced and certified professionals to provide project management consulting, project management training and project portfolio management.
