Once your Vision is clear, your Values must align for you to become who or what you want to! Your people within your organization will only rise to the level the company structure enables, but your company will only become as good as its people. Business is about people and relationships and how well you work together. It starts with trust. If your company focuses on hiring high character people first, they will learn what they need to learn and your value will grow naturally. The best way to work with good people is to attract good people. Start with an amazing Vision of what you can become together for the market you serve and then focus on a Value system that helps you progress toward your highest value in your work together!
Virtues & Values
Who we are (Our Personal Virtues) largely make up what we value (Our Organizational Values). Personal integrity, honesty, temperance, being courageous, wise, judicious, caring, loyal, and having a love of knowledge and truth are all examples of a person having a high moral character. Don’t kid yourself. It matters. It leads to a business culture of transparency, teamwork, and genuine interest in success as individuals and as a whole.
I worked at a high caliber institution, Brigham Young University, for many years in a top 5 Academic Library, but found myself ready for another opportunity when an executive came looking for a Special Projects Assistant he could trust to help his team harvest knowledge and build-up operations in another country. It presented a challenge to grow in an area of not only gathering knowledge and understanding, but to apply it in a real practical way toward a growing endeavor much greater than myself. I interviewed directly with the CEO and then filled out extensive assessments, both mainly to determine if I could be trusted with high confidence. I was tasked with helping progress his baby so-to-speak in this highly important and pivotal role assisting high-level projects translate from executive initiatives to 500 new frontline workers onsite. We accomplished that extraordinary feat within a year of launching a Business Process Outsourcer (BPO).
Know Your Values
Storyboard PM, LLC mostly values continuous improvement: always learning, always adapting, always growing, and always teaching and sharing knowledge. I will not pretend to know what Values an Organization should set up for its unique endeavor, but I know it is very important to raise the banner high. My focus is on where project management fits into what you value as an organization. I have worked with organizations that had no real Vision to look to, let alone shared Values to reference, and valuing the bottom-line just doesn’t count. Besides, it was very difficult to know what exactly we wanted to accomplish or how we wanted to accomplish it together. There are companies that have Values in name only but don’t really pay attention to or follow it throughout the organization. Other companies have some great Values but do not necessarily value continual improvement. Make sure everyone is on the same page with your Values and that continually progressing is a shared Value highlighted in your organization!
Organizational Project Management Values
Organizational Project Management values continual improvement. Your greatest asset is your people, but the larger the organization the more difficult it is to orchestrate shared values across people of different ages, cultures, and backgrounds. Setting up your organization’s culture starts at the top and is affected by every new hire. Whether or not your organization adapts and evolves to its developing strengths and grows together rather than apart, will depend on how well a group of individuals espouse a united culture of progress and act as one to always strive to be better. It can be difficult and uncomfortable to take a hard look at what you, your teams, or your organization could do better, but if you have an organized strategy to approach implementing higher standards incrementally together you will be all the better for it.
Storyboard PM provides systems that help organizations to educate all levels of the organization on how to integrate improvement projects write better workflows into reality. At the organizational level it helps the company document policies, at the department level it helps document processes, and at the specialist level it helps document procedures. This allows your personnel at every level to take charge of their work in tandem with everyone they work with. Together you can smooth out workflows between all your team members, but it starts with a shared value of becoming your best as a whole rather than just as yourself, because the only way to be your best self is improving together as one team!
Project Management Values
Professional Project Management values continual improvement. Business Process Management is all about continual improvement projects. It could be about what we did wrong, but lessons learned are actually better served with a mindset that we are always learning and growing as individuals and as teams. No one knows everything, especially with projects where not everything is known. We figure things out together and then we iterate on the next project to refine and polish the process more and more. It’s about progress, not perfection. No one person and no team are perfect, but in striving to continually progress you are perfect in that one thing of pursuing your values.
Project Management has a perfect model for continually progressing your work from project to project. Whether by retrospectives or lessons learned meetings your teams can harvest understanding and convert it into Organizational Process Assets (OPAs) as it hands off a new or improved process to operations.
Storyboard PM has an extraordinary system for continually progressing your workflows and processes by enabling your organization to harvest best practices, convert “tribal knowledge”, and establish Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) into some form of a Learning Management System (LMS).
Teams Value
Your teams value progression and fulfillment in their careers as individuals and as an organization. Everyone feels better about themselves when they are part of something great that is bigger than themselves. When your teams are focused on continual improvement together it brings the team together and successful completion of projects make life easier. When individuals are burdened with a lot of difficult or time consuming work with little support, relief, or aid to push through challenges or remove obstacles, or the work of others outside of their control is suffering because of lack of teamwork the problem may not be you as an individual. In other words, you alone may not be able to makeup for the breakdowns caused or hid by members of your team. But if your team fights through the growing pains, learns to come together through difficult issues, and become early adopters of project change initiatives that will ultimately make work better, you will realize the value of learning, adapting, and growing together and your business will benefit as well.
Continually Improving Toward Your Values
When you value people and you truly appreciate shared work values you will want the best for one another. You will want to value continually improving as individuals, teams, and organizations. You will strive to make work better for everyone by working as one on improvement projects. You will put differences aside. You will put politics aside. You will seek to achieve together what cannot be achieved alone and your organization will thrive rather than just survive. Value continual improvement and you will see continual incremental gains even if just little by little, project by project, success by success.
Storyboard PM Solution
I founded Storyboard PM to integrate organizational project management as a business solution that gets and keeps our business teams on the same page to progress our work together.
Let’s lift organizational and project management maturity from one level to the next on the way to realizing our Values as successful individuals, teams, and organizations.