Our spherical world has been declared flat once again. And if your company has any age on it at all, you have likely found that the old way of doing business fits about as well as the suit you wore 30 pounds ago.
Not only have many operations scattered to the four corners of the globe, the attitudes of the work force have undergone a similar shift. People no longer expect to follow a predictable, hierarchical career path. They now expect to take part in numerous quick-forming, quick-dissolving teams that implement a series of short-term projects that, together, make up their long-term career. They have seen the long-term jobs of their parents outsourced or downsized.
Here are a number of challenges that the modern enterprise must adapt to in this short-term, project-based business world, especially in light of the expectations of workers that thrive in that environment:
• Current business systems on their own don’t match up with the operations needed in a flattened world. These systems want to impose a certain rigidity within business processes and fail to address the dynamic interplay and constantly shifting relationships between projects and people, which occurs naturally in the flat world and characterizes today’s business. That is why so many ERP, project management and work force management systems are so heavily customized.
• Rapidly accelerating globalization has changed all the rules. At the start of this shift, organizations moved simple tasks like assembly and manufacturing to developing countries. In globalization’s current wave, organizations are outsourcing knowledge work as well. At first, only large multinational corporations outsourced operations — but that is quickly changing. In the current wave, all organizations — even those with just a few employees — are outsourcing and conducting business globally. But while globalization offers many opportunities for those who do it right, it takes only one mistake for a company to end up in a huge mess. The safety, ethical and strategic challenges imposed by going global will act as huge obstacles for any company without the proper tools in place to ensure operations are being constantly checked and balanced.
• Companies must learn to operate as fragmented enterprises. The conventional company has its entire work force under one roof. Today, it is easy to reach out to people who work on projects, as well as to external parties that operate mainly as suppliers with discrete deliverables that do not collaborate with the company’s workers on a frequent or constant basis. The fragmented enterprise of today assigns work to internal or outsourced teams based on costs, available talent, the nature of work, and customer expectations. It is much more difficult to communicate, collaborate and coordinate with a highly dispersed workforce that operates in multiple geographies and time zones, and yet companies have no choice but to do so to tap into the global talent pool they need.
• The government is watching with an eagle eye. As organizations have become more fragmented, they also have become subject to greater regulatory scrutiny. Today’s businesses must achieve and maintain compliance with regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley, which directly impact project execution and work force management. In order to meet new regulatory standards, companies need more thorough and expansive systems for assigning, tracking and managing accountability for the work being done. The good news is these controls protect everyone: workers, customers, suppliers – effectively, all of the organization’s stakeholders.
• The traditional chain of command has been broken. Widely distributed companies cannot use an authoritative command-and-control structure. Instead, market leaders must find ways to remove the red-tape shackles from their project teams and empower them to get work done and make local decisions on their own.
• Current systems produce a blizzard of assorted and often conflicting data that can be difficult for businesses to overcome. Disconnected or manually integrated systems, a mish-mash of unapproved data, and a wild e-mail exchange of spreadsheets leads to an environment that is ripe for revenue leakages, errors, fraud and systemic control weakness. Disconnected systems result in dozens and, in large corporations, easily hundreds of spreadsheets to track work, to import and export data, and to report on customers, projects and workers. To further complicate matters, some of these applications are used on-demand and others remain on-premise systems.
Businesses must synthesize four aspects of their operations — human capital management, project management, business process management and cost/revenue accounting — into one solution called Project Work Force Management. This new system enables them to meet the cooperative collaboration challenges of a flat world.
Clearly, companies who are unable to overcome the aforementioned challenges will find surviving in a flat world difficult, if not impossible. Confused or lost companies must make changes if they want to stay competitive.
This is a scary time. But it’s also an exciting one. Adapt to the new realities and the world is, quite literally, at your fingertips. •
Rudolf Melik is the CEO of Tenrox. His new book, “The Rise of the Project Workforce: Managing People and Projects in a Flat World,” (Wiley, 2007, $34.95) is available at bookstores.
