The eight areas of clarification in handling projects

To order the fundamentals, we take up an idea made popular by the author Simon Sinek, the so-called Golden Circle. Its core idea is strikingly simple: effective organisations think from the inside out. They begin with the Why, their purpose and conviction, then move to the How, their way of acting, and only then to the What, the concrete things they do. Sinek himself understands the How primarily as values and ways of proceeding.

Under these three brackets we arrange eight areas of clarification. They describe what must be clarified in handling the new. That there are exactly eight is not a derivation from a law of nature but a deliberately chosen structure that has proven itself in practice – fine enough to be concrete, coarse enough to remain clear. The glossary sets out Sinek's meaning and ours side by side.

At the beginning stands the question of why the organisation exists at all. A good answer does not sound glossy but like the image of the honest merchant: a good existence satisfies real needs of real people who cannot satisfy them themselves, and it does so with care for people, nature and the environment. This Why is the culture and identity of a company. It is the level at which trust, attitude and shared meaning live.

And this is exactly where a clear boundary belongs that applies to the whole Office. The Why, culture and identity, is the foundation on which everything else builds. The Office does not create this foundation. It operates in the realm of the How and the What for the new and presupposes a fundamentally healthy Why. Where the culture of a company does not hold, other measures are needed that work at this deeper level. The new can only be built on a sound existing base. Anyone starting from scratch is in a different situation, that of a start-up, which follows its own rules.

Keeping these levels cleanly apart is not a sign of narrowness but of clarity, because only then do you know what you may expect from which level.

The eight areas of clarification build on each other in content. Every open question in one area can create friction further down, which in the end becomes visible as a bottleneck in projects. All eight deliberately relate to undertakings and project work, not to general line management. This expressly includes customer orders carried out as projects in the core business.

Purpose and value

Area of clarification 1: What for, and which undertakings contribute to it? The first area of clarification follows from the Why. Only those who know the organisation's purpose can judge which undertakings serve it and which merely tie up resources. Without this yardstick, every new undertaking becomes a matter of taste.

Area of clarification 2: How do we create value, and what do projects contribute to it? The business model describes how the organisation creates value. For projects, it means the ability to recognise what contribution an undertaking makes to the core business, to the margin, to performance or to necessary change.

Portfolio and governance

Area of clarification 3: Which undertakings do we start, and which not? This is where the decision is made about which undertakings are started at all, which are postponed and which are ended, and how they relate to each other. In technical terms, this is the portfolio view. It includes the idea of goal-oriented investment: you decide early and deliberately whether an undertaking promises enough benefit at all, instead of noticing late and expensively that it leads into a dead end.

Area of clarification 4: Who decides about the undertakings? This area of clarification regulates who approves an undertaking, who may stop it, who has a say and who is informed. That is the core of what governance means: the binding framework of roles and decision rights for handling undertakings. Experts often consider the seemingly simple question of who actually decides here more important for success or failure than any plan, however good. Project governance has noticeably gained in importance in recent years because organisations are moving more and more things at the same time. Without clarified decision rights, exactly the friction arises that paralyses the new: everyone waits for everyone else, and nobody dares to decide. Because the term governance is so central and at the same time so ambiguous, it is also defined in the glossary.

Execution, information, tools and learning

Area of clarification 5: How do we lead an individual undertaking? This is the area of clarification of actual project leadership, from the project impulse or customer order through planning and implementation to completion, handover or use. As long as everyone leads an undertaking differently, it can neither be handed over reliably nor compared nor overseen together.

Area of clarification 6: What can be relied on in an undertaking? This area of clarification clarifies what information about an undertaking arises, where it resides and how reliable it is. A status report is only worth as much as the trust in the figures it contains.

Area of clarification 7: Which tools support projects? Only now do systems and technology come in. A tool amplifies what is already there. On an orderly basis it accelerates project work; on a disorderly one it cements the disorder. The tool question is important, but it is the seventh, not the first.

Area of clarification 8: How do we learn from undertaking to undertaking? The last area of clarification ensures that something is gained from every completed undertaking for the next one. Without this area of clarification, every improvement remains an isolated case.

One principle stands above all eight areas of clarification. What is clarified is recorded and stays in the organisation, not in individual heads. And the three brackets interlock like an inheritance: the Why, the culture, shapes the How, the governance and the principles, and these shape the What, concrete implementation in operations as in projects. In this way the connection is passed down from the base organisation through the culture into every single undertaking.

Now we can clearly place what we are actually talking about, and the term that we have deliberately not yet put at the centre may now be used. The eight areas of clarification describe an organisation's deliberate, orderly handling of projects, and there is a name for that: project management. It concerns change initiatives as well as customer orders carried out as projects in the core business.

The line, the base organisation, carries permanent responsibilities, processes and knowledge. Projects are time-limited organisational forms for specific results. These two logics are not the same as “run” and “change”: in manufacturing and project-intensive companies, customer orders can themselves belong to the recurring core business and still be led as projects.

Project management therefore does not sit only at the bottom, in implementation. It creates value where good project leadership improves impact, efficiency and economic results.

How far an organisation has come with these clarifications is described by the maturity level in Chapter 7. Who carries which responsibility is described by the five levels of responsibility in Chapter 10.