Five Leadership Systems Behind High-Performing Capital Projects

Why do some project leadership teams consistently outperform others?

Large capital projects often involve budgets, staffing levels, and organizational complexity comparable to midsized enterprises. Yet many project leadership teams are never equipped with the executive leadership systems needed to coordinate work at that scale.

The skills project leaders require can be organized into five sets of integrated practice families. A practice family is a set of processes that together support collaborative work principles resulting enhanced quality, reduced costs, and quicker delivery times for capital projects. These five families are listed below, along with the principle each supports and a brief description of the types of processes each family includes.

Project Team Architecture

Principle: The health of a system is determined by the quality of interactions and relationships between the people working in that system.

How a team is structured shapes the way people interact and influences the communication processes available to the team. This practice family includes a range of processes for weekly work coordination, paired design, set-based design, decisionmaking, innovation, and other practices that are in play on a daily and weekly basis to promote collaboration and the streamlined production of a quality asset. The architecture of the team guides the work beginning with concept design and finishing with the commissioning and activation of the project.

Workflow Strategy

Principle: Organizing complex work into loosely coupled modules improves collaboration by reducing the complexity of integrating components of the project work and promotes speed by organizing focused work into small teams.

How workflow is organized is a determinant of cost and the time to deliver a project. Processes for organizing the project into loosely coupled modules, and then establishing clear stages within each module simplify the understanding and leadership of complex projects. A modular structure allows cross-functional teams to focus their performance without multi-tasking. An incremental stage organization within modules promotes continuous workflow and steady, sustainable effort by the people supporting the project.

Shared Leadership

Principle: The work of capital project teams is best understood as set of integrated leadership practices, in which individuals share responsibility and accountability for optimizing a dynamic set of coordinated actions for a mutual and meaningful objective.

Sharing leadership means recognizing that each person brings unique personal strengths to the project team that are as important as their professional strengths. Personal strengths need often to be drawn out of people as many work and social environments condition people to suppress these strengths. Personal strengths provide team members the ability to step forward to contribute ideas and explore and invent a wider range of possible solutions to problems. Processes in this practice family support professional development, appreciation for individual strengths, a definition of group identities, and a shared appreciation of the beneficial impact the project is making in people’s lives.

Situational Awareness

Principle: Since it is not possible to predict all internal and external conditions that will influence project outcomes it is important to become aware of unanticipated conditions quickly and integrate that awareness into our work.

Project teams need processes for ensuring people have both access to information they need for their work and awareness of conditions that may impact their work. Processes include visual management, information storage and retrieval protocols, and the display of the range of workflow plans. Situational awareness processes simplify the search for relevant information, streamline the generation of valued information, and eliminate the production of useless information.

System Innovation

Principle: Systems are not static, and without a conscious and consistent effort of improving a capital project leadership system project performance will decay.

Innovation is the drive to improve levels of performance. It includes problem solving with the understanding that the seeds of problems on projects are planted well before the problems becomes visible. The focus is on innovation in work processes because the improvement of daily work is as important as the daily work itself. Improvements are focused on the practices that form the project leadership system, and process impacts on outcomes are understood at the system level.

Conclusion

By equipping your capital project leadership teams with the capabilities embodied in these five practice families you provide them with the organizational executive skills pertinent to their executive level responsibilities.