Project management as an organi­sational capability

An organisation needs a permanent base organisation with clear responsibilities, processes and knowledge. In technical terms, this is the line. It creates stability and carries the recurring capability of the organisation. The core business also belongs to the line, even when parts of this core business are delivered as projects.

Alongside it stands the project logic. A project is a time-limited undertaking with a specific result and its own coordination task. It can be a change within one's own organisation. But it can just as well be a customer order in the core business, if that order is led as a project because of its uniqueness, specialisation and cross-departmental collaboration.

When these pages speak of “the new”, they therefore mean the particular nature of the specific undertaking and not automatically a change business.

Line and project logic support each other. Internal change projects must transfer their results into the base organisation. Customer orders run as projects, in turn, need stable processes, roles and knowledge from the line so that they can be carried out reliably and economically. A healthy organisation masters both logics and knows how to interlock them.

Many companies master well-established line processes. The orderly handling of projects, on the other hand, often depends more heavily on individual people. This applies both to change initiatives and to companies whose customer orders are increasingly led as projects. Why this nevertheless works for a long time, and when it is no longer enough, is the subject of the next chapter.

Experience and thesis · more

In a small organisation, the second pillar needs no order of its own. People sit close together, call out to each other what is coming up, and a new undertaking is led in conversation, just like everything else. That works surprisingly well, and it is wise to handle it this way, because a small company does not need bureaucracy. This logic of calling across the room is a strength, not a failing.

So it is not the number of people that becomes the problem, but the number of connections between them, and that grows far faster than the organisation itself.

How it feels depends on size. It is worth walking along the path that many companies take. The following sizes are experience and thesis: a value from practical experience, not a study. The transitions are fluid.

At around ten employees the person in charge is usually right in the thick of it. They lead the new personally because they have everything in view anyway. That works well as long as they are there. The growing price is that nothing of what they do is recorded anywhere else.

At thirty to sixty employees the new can no longer be led in one person's head alone. Several people take on undertakings, each in their own way, and the first frictions arise because nobody proceeds in exactly the same way. Coordination starts to cost noticeable time.

At one hundred to one hundred and eighty employees many people run undertakings in parallel, each following their own logic. Management loses the overall picture, not because nobody reports, but because the reports are not comparable. This is where the wish for a shared order becomes clear for the first time.

At two hundred to five hundred employees the variety of working methods has become a cost factor. Undertakings cannot be compared, onboarding takes a long time, and nobody can say reliably which undertakings really contribute to the strategy.

Larger organisations know all this anyway, only in a more acute form.

The number of employees is only half the truth. What matters is the relationship between the complexity of the undertakings and the organisation's ability to cope with it. Ten similar, independent undertakings are rarely a problem despite their number; they resemble each other and do not interfere. Five complex, interdependent undertakings, by contrast, create a high coordination effort, because every change in one affects the others. And with very experienced people, much of this is put into perspective again, because they absorb complexity through skill.

Experience and thesis · more

The critical moment is therefore not a particular headcount. It is reached when so much that is new comes together at the same time that the established teams and familiar routines can no longer carry it. Then the curve jumps, frictions and mutual disruptions arise, and suddenly even simple undertakings become complicated because they get in each other's way.

To put it bluntly: five people in a room for an hour is not a one-hour meeting but a five-hour meeting. The exaggeration is deliberate, but it hits the true core: every additional person costs everyone else time.

Taken on its own, each of these signs is harmless. Together they form a pattern, and anyone who recognises it early can act while it is still easy. Chapter 6 shows what this pattern feels like when you are right in the middle of it. What reaches its limit first at this point is the capability of individuals. That is the subject of the next chapter.

Experience and thesis · more

If there is no shared way of dealing with the new, everyone has only one option: to handle it from their own capability. From experience, from gut feeling, with skill. One could call it the trouser-pocket model. At the decisive moment, everyone pulls their solution out of their own trouser pocket, off the cuff.

This is expressly nothing bad. With capable, experienced people it often works excellently, and such people are a treasure for any organisation. But this is exactly where the trap lies. Because it works, nobody notices that every time things are improvised from scratch. Nothing of what succeeds in one person's head becomes a path that someone else can take too.

As long as a few experienced people carry everything, it goes well. As the organisation grows, the strength of the individual unnoticeably becomes a vulnerability of the whole.

The answer is not to make people uniform. The diversity of people is a strength. The answer is to bring the approach into an orderly flow, so that the new reliably becomes the proven. That is exactly what a method is for. Not as a rigid corset and not as a thick rulebook to be learned by heart, but as a manageable number of clear principles of action that everyone orients themselves by. These principles of action can also be called cornerstones; the meaning is the same: a few load-bearing guard rails instead of a hundred detailed rules.

It is not about the one and only correct method. An organisation can quite well develop its own. What matters is not which method it is, but that there is an orderly, shared path at all. For that is where the real value of a good method lies:

A good method also helps a less experienced person achieve strong impact, if they orient themselves by the shared principles of action.

Experience and thesis · more

That is the core. It is about effectiveness, and it is about everyone being able to be effective, including those who do not yet see the whole picture. A good structure does not put the strong on a pedestal; it lifts the whole team to a reliable level. The capability of individual people becomes the capability of the organisation.

In all honesty, the limits of this approach must be named too. A good method and capable people are worth a lot, but they do not solve everything. Three weaknesses should be seen openly.

These weaknesses point to something that goes beyond structure and principles. Structure provides security and orientation, but it must not stifle movement; that is why principles of action are needed as well, enabling independent, good decisions. And for people to decide voluntarily and in the interest of the whole, more than rules is needed: it takes a sound culture. Structures and strategies alone do not change an organisation. Change only takes effect when shared ideas and lived practices change as well. In this sense, culture is not a soft side issue but part of the change itself.

Experience and thesis · more

What I describe here strengthens how the new is handled; it does not create an organisation's culture. Chapter 5 sets out this boundary.

Many organisations first reach for other remedies. That is the subject of the next chapter.

When the limit becomes noticeable, organisations react in a surprisingly similar way, and unfortunately often in a way that makes things worse rather than better. The most common reflex is to prescribe more order. People reorganise and introduce further methods, assuming that this will solve the problem. But because the load-bearing basic structure was never there, this only creates more instability. The diligent and self-sacrificing take on even more; others withdraw further. There are more and more coordinators and fewer and fewer doers. And in the worst case, the resulting disruptions are flanked with even more controls and regulations, which further increases the imbalance. The consequences can be measurable: more coordination effort, longer lead times, greater strain or lower productivity. Which effects occur depends on the task, the team and the organisation.

Experience and thesis · more

Beneath the surface, something is added that makes matters worse. Those involved do not only disagree about what needs to be done. They already disagree about what is actually going on. Everyone sees their own section, focuses on their own topics, and hardly anyone looks beyond their own patch at the whole.

Looking more closely, four typical counter-measures can be identified, and each has its own weakness.

People talk to each other more. Additional appointments make up in conversation for what is lacking in shared order. The tricky part is that these meetings themselves become the problem. The researcher Gloria Mark and her colleagues observed that, after an interruption, people took around twenty-three minutes on average to return to the task they had originally been working on, often after working on other tasks in between. Anyone who is interrupted frequently therefore works in fragments: the actual task waits while other things come in between.

Added to this is a surprising finding: interruptions do not necessarily lead to longer working times. In one study, interrupted people even worked faster, but reported more stress, frustration, time pressure and effort. The price therefore does not necessarily show on the clock, but in the strain.

A new tool is supposed to bring order. But a tool only depicts what is already ordered. Where there is no shared way of working, the tool does not create one; it only creates a more expensive version of the same muddle. The call for a tool is the classic response to every new challenge, and sometimes a tool really does solve a problem. Often, however, it merely manages the problem in a nicer form. And because every tool again connects people who have to coordinate, the same effect comes into play as with meetings: more participants mean disproportionately more coordination effort.

Someone is hired to take care of it. That can be right, but it shifts the problem if the new person enters the same disordered situation. More people do not automatically increase a team's performance. As a team grows, coordination effort increases. When people are simply added to a stalling undertaking, those involved so far may also read this as a signal that they are not trusted with the task. Additional people can therefore, under certain circumstances, make implementation harder rather than faster.

Experience and thesis · more

The most personal and, in the end, most dangerous reaction. You take over yourself and become the point where everything comes together. That works as long as you are there and have the strength. It makes you the bottleneck, the organisation dependent on you, and it ensures that nothing of your knowledge ever becomes shared knowledge. It is the reaction that looks most like responsibility and creates the least of it.

All four remedies have the same thing in common. The energy flows into coordination and into fixing disruptions instead of into the actual implementation. More and more people are kept busy compensating for the missing structure by hand. That is the core of the imbalance: more is administered and less is achieved.

Let us change perspective for a moment. The bottleneck looks like a problem of execution, that is, like something that should be solved further down in the organisation. On closer inspection, it often arises further up, where fundamentals would need to be clarified.

Experience and thesis · more

It would, however, be too simple to claim that there is always only a single cause behind it. Reality has many layers. Undertakings sometimes simply compete for too few people. Decision logic, changing priorities and constant switching between too many tasks all have an effect. That is real and cannot be defined away.

But, and this is the decisive and encouraging point, much of this becomes solvable as soon as the new is made visible and the fundamentals are clarified. When things are clearly visible, clear decisions can be made. When undertakings have clear goals and recognisably contribute to the strategy, sensible prioritisation becomes possible. Such issues are solvable; they are not an unchangeable fate. Chapter 5 shows which fundamentals these are.

To order the fundamentals, I 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.

Source of thought, not evidence: Simon SinekSources of thought →

Under these three brackets I 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 the one used here side by side.

Experience and thesis · more

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.

Experience and thesis · more

And this is exactly where a clear boundary belongs that applies to the whole publication. The Why, culture and identity, is the foundation on which everything else builds. This publication 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 is it 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. The seemingly simple question of who actually decides here is often more important for success or failure than any plan, however good. 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.

Source of thought, not evidence: Gary Klein and Daniel Kahneman (premortem)Sources of thought →

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 what this publication is actually about can be placed clearly, and the term that I 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.

Experience and thesis · more

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. The story in the next chapter shows what open areas of clarification feel like in everyday work.

Imagine a company that has grown steadily over the years. Order books are healthy, the people are experienced, the customers satisfied. Much is going exceptionally well, and that is the honest starting point. And yet those responsible sense that something is no longer running smoothly with the new.

It begins harmlessly. A report that used to be reliably on the desk on Friday now only arrives on Monday. Nobody makes a drama of it. But gradually a quiet unease creeps in. The well-practised groove, that natural meshing together, develops cracks. In a meeting someone makes a remark of the kind made a hundred times before, and this time someone feels attacked. Small conflicts appear where there were none before.

By now several people are running undertakings, each in their own way. As long as everything goes well, the difference goes unnoticed. As soon as an undertaking runs into difficulties, nobody notices in time because a shared yardstick is missing. When management asks about the status in a meeting, the responses are structured so differently that they can hardly be compared. People suspect that one of the undertakings is behind schedule but cannot prove it, and the person responsible is convinced that everything is under control. Instead of looking at the matter together, people start to justify themselves and look for reasons in others.

It is not only executive management that feels this pressure. It hits the team leader one level below just as hard. She is expected to deliver but has no reliable overview of her own people's work, because everyone records what they do differently. So she keeps asking, and because that is tedious, in the end she prefers to do much of it herself. She becomes the bottleneck of her own team, not out of a need for control, but for lack of a shared basis.

No additional tool and no additional person closes this gap as long as management does not clarify these three areas.

Then comes the day when the most experienced person leaves the company. And here something shows that a survey also points to. Many organisations do carry out so-called lessons learned, that is, reviews of completed undertakings. In a survey of around a thousand experienced project managers cited by Blaize Horner Reich, sixty-two per cent even had a formal procedure for this. But only twelve per cent actually adhered to it. The knowledge is captured, but hardly used. It moves into filing systems that become silent archives from which nobody retrieves anything any more. What survives are mostly the forms and templates, not the actual insights.

Experience and thesis · more

It would therefore be wrong to say that this organisation does not learn at all. It certainly learns the small things in everyday work. But the valuable knowledge from the new, which arises when an undertaking passes into operations, is largely lost because it depends only on people and was never put into a shared form. With the experienced person goes a treasure, and her successor starts almost from scratch.

This company has no technology problem and no personnel problem. It has a strong foundation and a gap in its second pillar. The first step is not to buy something but to recognise and clarify the few open areas of clarification. The good remains; it just finally gets something to hold on to.

The next chapter describes where an organisation stands overall with these clarifications. Chapter 9 shows how knowledge stays in the organisation instead of in individual heads.

Before planning a route, it helps to know where you start. For this I use two different pictures, and because they are easily confused, their relationship is expressly clarified here. The eight areas of clarification from Chapter 5 describe what needs to be clarified; they are the substantive topics. The maturity level describes how far an organisation has come overall in clarifying and recording.

The two do not stand side by side but crosswise to each other. The areas of clarification say which topics you are working on. The maturity level says how far the organisation has already come in them overall. You work on all eight areas of clarification and grow through the maturity levels as you do so. In short: the areas of clarification are the What, the maturity level is the How far.

The maturity level is not a report card or a grade, but a map. Its only purpose is to determine the honest starting point and find the next sensible step.

Level 1: Person-dependent. The new succeeds because individual people carry it, and their knowledge sits in their heads. How quickly this can tip is shown by an image from practice: if a key person leaves, the knowledge can vanish within a short time because it was recorded nowhere. The next step is modest and effective: recording the most important knowledge for the very first time.

Level 2: Documented. First descriptions and templates emerge but are not yet applied the same way everywhere. The next step: turning scattered documents into a binding basis for everyone.

Level 3: Standardised. The approach and roles for undertakings are defined and apply to everyone. New people find their way faster. The next step: making the impact measurable.

Level 4: Measurable. It becomes transparent where the new is going well and where it stalls. Decisions rest on facts instead of assumptions. The next step: mapping the clarified and measured processes digitally in a targeted way.

Level 5: Digitally supported. Now the digital comes into play, and deliberately only here. At this point, digital does not yet mean anything grand, but simply: the knowledge is recorded and can be retrieved again. Systems reliably maintain the clarified processes and make the handling of the new traceable. Here digitalisation creates real benefit because it builds on an orderly basis.

Level 6: Self-learning. The highest level is often confused with mere digital aids, but it is something fundamentally different. A self-learning organisation does not just collect knowledge; it manages it. It keeps it free of contradictions and makes it available to everyone at any time in its context. Imagine information that flows seamlessly from the workplace to management, condensed and tailored to the respective context, so that good decisions become possible without anyone having to wade through hundreds of slides. That requires genuine knowledge management: recognising patterns, drawing conclusions, deriving principles from them for one's own next undertaking.

An organisation at level 2 gains little from the tools of level 5 as long as the intermediate levels are missing. The maturity model helps to make visible organisational preconditions that can be relevant when introducing systems. It is an orientation model, not empirical proof of why a specific introduction succeeds or disappoints.

The leap from the fifth to the sixth level, towards a truly self-learning organisation, requires further means and a development of its own that no single tool can deliver.

One pattern shows up even in mature environments: on the way until a decision reaches the top, individual participants build in their own interests instead of deciding in the interest of the whole. At its core this is a question of culture, of the Why, not of method. This model works neither on an organisation's Why nor on its base organisation; Chapter 5 sets out this boundary. The next chapter shows how the pattern arises and why clarification therefore so often stops halfway.

Research points to it · more

The most common mistake is to start with area of clarification 7. A new tool is supposed to create the order that never emerged at the levels before it. Then the technology is not the problem, but the unclarified basis beneath it. What moves into a system in disorder is afterwards in disorder in a system.

The second mistake is to leave the entire clarification to an outsider or to a new position, in the hope that someone else will lay down the fundamentals for management. In failed undertakings a recurring pattern emerges: leadership, stakeholders and risks are not addressed at the outset, top management takes too little initiative, and too much burden rests on the shoulders of employees. Much of the preparation can be delegated, but the decisions that depend on leadership responsibility cannot be made by anyone from outside.

The third mistake is the quietest. People clarify the upper, pleasantly strategic areas and stop where it becomes uncomfortable, at decision rights and ingrained habits. Change initiatives can stall or miss their goals. The reasons can include organisational, communication-related and leadership-related factors; no single cause that applies to all undertakings can be identified. The pattern at issue here is a specific one: what remains is a clear intention whose implementation fails because of the unclarified areas that follow.

Experience and thesis · more

It is worth looking more closely at why it stops precisely there. The upper areas cost reflection. The following ones cost something else, namely influence. Whoever defines decision rights redistributes them. Whoever orders ingrained habits puts into words what previously applied unspoken. That is not a problem of good will but a predictable reaction, and it occurs in well-run organisations just as much as elsewhere.

Experience and thesis · more

Added to this is something that happens daily in the meeting room and is rarely named. In the debate about an undertaking, it is not always the best proposal that prevails, but often the best presented one. Whoever masters the art of being right wins against the one who is right but argues less well. That is why a visible decision path alone is not enough. Visibility helps where an organisation can tolerate contradiction. Where it cannot, the visible path is simply played better.

Open · more

Experience and thesis · more

This names the most important precondition, and it is at the same time the clearest limit of this publication. The ability to handle conflict is a precondition, nothing a method can create. Clarification can create the place where assumptions and decisions become visible. Whether an organisation can then bear what it sees is for it to decide.

What you can take away from this is not a diagnosis of your organisation but a new lens. Next time, pay attention to who puts which figure on the table when, and how confidently it is presented. Afterwards you will see more than before. Nothing more is needed at this point.

Source of thought, not evidence: Daniel Kahneman, Jim CollinsSources of thought →

Behind this stands a simple economics that supports the idea of this publication. Clarification at the very beginning, when you define what an undertaking is meant to achieve at all, is, as a rule, the most favourable point in time. A mistake recognised at that stage can usually be corrected with far less effort than in the middle of implementation.

Experience and thesis · more

That early clarification nevertheless does not happen also has to do with a well-studied error of thinking. Daniel Kahneman describes it as the inside view versus the outside view. Anyone estimating the effort of an undertaking looks at their own team and their own plan and arrives at a figure that is regularly far too low. Only looking at comparable undertakings by others corrects it. Reference class forecasting builds on this insight: it adjusts one's own estimate using the actual course of comparable undertakings.

Source of thought, not evidence: Daniel KahnemanSources of thought →

In the reference model from Chapter 10, this is exactly where the impulse phase with its decision points comes in. It helps to make early clarification a conscious step before an idea becomes a binding undertaking. The idea is not to make every project heavier, but to ask the right questions early enough, while course corrections are still cheap.

What has been clarified must be recorded. That is the subject of the next chapter.

Open · more

There is a decisive difference between what a person knows and what the organisation knows. As long as knowledge lives only in heads, it leaves the building as soon as a head leaves. For an organisation that is not bad luck but an avoidable risk, and reducing it is part of the leadership task.

Chapter 6 shows what happens when knowledge depends only on people.

Here a fine but important distinction is worthwhile, one that is often blurred. The clarification itself, that is working out the fundamentals, preparing information and developing proposals, can and should be delegated. Nobody expects leadership to gather every basis with their own hands. What cannot be delegated are the decisions that depend on leadership responsibility.

The preparation may pass through many hands; the decision stays with leadership. Drawing this line cleanly relieves and protects at the same time.

Above all, the information and documents needed for project leadership and project steering must be recorded: approach, roles, decision logic and insights gained. This leadership and steering information makes projects traceable and manageable for the organisation.

Subject-matter project results are something else. They can continue to be kept in the systems, repositories and tools intended for them. This requires neither a central repository for all project information nor a comprehensive knowledge management solution for the entire company.

How far an organisation has already come with this, from person-dependent to self-learning handling of knowledge, is shown by the maturity level in Chapter 7. What has been recorded needs a framework that applies to all projects. That is the subject of the next chapter.

A construction project follows a different logic from software development. An organisational and change project needs different work steps from a procurement. Companies work with different types of project and process models, for example with classic or agile approaches, HERMES, PRINCE2, SAFe, RUP, SIA, ASAP or an approach of their own; PMI-based approaches can also be accommodated. Standards such as DIN 69901-5 are not process models but terminology references. That is not a problem. An approach should fit the task and the organisation.

It only becomes difficult when shared leadership disappears with every type of project. When every undertaking speaks a different language, knows different decision points and describes its status differently, the organisation loses the overview. This is exactly where the reference model comes in.

The reference model is not an additional project method. It is a shared leadership framework above different approaches. Its idea is simple: the concrete project execution may differ. The organisation's leadership nevertheless needs reliable points at which it can decide, steer and exercise responsibility.

That is why the reference model spans an arc:

Along this path lie management milestones. They give leadership orientation and create defined moments at which an undertaking can be reviewed and decided on. Underneath, the actual project execution can look different. Project work differs; manageability is preserved.

The reference model does not require a company to give up its proven method. Those who already have an approach of their own can keep it. Methods, phases and milestones can be tailored to the organisation. The reference model creates a shared view above them without making the concrete way of working underneath uniform.

So it is not about making all projects the same. It is about being able to lead different kinds of projects together.

Detailed explanations can be found in the glossary.

This shared leadership includes five levels of responsibility: strategy, portfolio, steering, leadership and execution. They answer a different question from the eight areas of clarification.

These three perspectives complement each other and must not be confused. An area of clarification such as decision rights or reliable information can affect several levels of responsibility at the same time. That is why the eight areas of clarification are not reduced to the five levels.

Chapter 1 distinguishes between line and project logic. The reference model makes a typical project path visible: an undertaking begins with an impulse or order, is clarified, conceived, realised and introduced or handed over. For internal change projects, the arc of leadership extends into use; for customer projects, up to a reliable handover and the agreed result.

Experience and thesis · more

A management milestone after introduction stands for no longer asking only whether a project result has been created and introduced, but whether it actually holds in operations and delivers the expected benefit. This makes the idea of this publication concrete: the new should become the proven. What this point is called and where it lies can be defined for the specific organisation or integrated into an existing method.

In the last chapter you can clarify for yourself where your own next undertaking stands in this picture.

Nothing more is needed to begin with. Take a quiet hour and go through the two perspectives honestly, alone or with the people who matter. Afterwards you will know what already holds, where more is possible and whether additional support would make sense at all.

Radical clarity does not automatically mean radical change. A deliberate “we'll leave it as it is” can be a good outcome if the consequences are understood and accepted.

If additional support can make a real difference, decide deliberately how you proceed: under your own steam or with support that suits your undertaking.

Good consulting does not automatically have to lead to more consulting.

An organisation capable of implementation is not one in which one person holds everything together. It is one in which nobody has to hold everything together any more.

If you are looking for support with a demanding undertaking, I describe how I work under “External Project Leadership and Project Management”.

These four kinds order the statements of this publication. For information in project reports and for contributions to project discussions, other distinctions help. They are set out in the articles “Uncertainty is information” and “Transparency that enables action. Not just clean documentation.”

The books that have shaped my thinking are listed under “Sources of thought”. They are sources of thought and not evidence. Where I rely on studies, I name the study and not the book that made it popular.

The eight areas of clarification ask: what must be clarified? The five levels of responsibility ask: who carries responsibility where? The maturity level asks: how far has the organisation come with it? These three perspectives lie crosswise to each other and complement each other.

ASAP ASAP stands for Accelerated SAP and refers to an approach developed by SAP for introducing SAP systems. It structures SAP introductions into consecutive work stages. Today ASAP is relevant mainly in connection with existing or older SAP project models; newer SAP introductions typically work with SAP Activate. In the reference model, ASAP stands as an example of an existing process logic that can be accommodated.

Base organisation / line The base organisation, often also called the line, carries permanent responsibilities, processes and knowledge. Projects are time-limited and deliver a specific result. Line and project are not the same as run and change: a company can sell customer orders repeatedly as part of its core business and still lead each individual order as a project. Internal change projects typically hand their result over to the base organisation; customer projects to the customer or into the customer's use.

Culture Culture refers to the shared attitudes, values and taken-for-granted assumptions of an organisation. It shows in how people actually deal with each other, decide, take responsibility, resolve conflicts and share knowledge. This publication presupposes a fundamentally sound culture and does not create it itself.

Deliverable / minimum deliverable A deliverable is a defined result that must be produced in the course of a project, such as a decision, concept, plan, report or subject-matter solution. A minimum deliverable is a result that should at least exist for leading or steering an undertaking. Subject-matter project results can remain in the systems intended for them.

DIN 69901-5 DIN 69901 is a German series of standards on project management and project management systems. DIN 69901-5 is not a project management method but the part of the series that deals with project management terminology. In the reference model, the DIN therefore stands for a standards-oriented project management system and not for a single prescribed method.

Eight areas of clarification The substantive questions that an organisation must answer in handling the new. They describe what must be clarified, not which hierarchical level is responsible. They are deliberately not called “levels”, to avoid confusion with the five levels of responsibility.

Five levels of responsibility Strategy, portfolio, steering, leadership and execution. They answer the question of who carries which responsibility at which level and takes which decisions. They are not the same as the eight areas of clarification.

Governance / project governance Governance refers to the binding framework within which an organisation makes decisions, distributes responsibility and exercises control. In project management, this covers in particular roles, decision rights, approvals, escalations and the question of who may approve, change or stop an undertaking.

HERMES HERMES is a project management method developed in Switzerland. It is used particularly in the public sector, but can also be used for other organisations and different kinds of undertakings. HERMES is results-oriented: not only activities but above all the results to be produced are at the centre. The phase model links tasks, roles, results and decision points and supports both classic and agile approaches.

HERMES is a good example of method neutrality: a company that already works with HERMES does not have to give up this approach. It can be adopted into the organisation-specific design of the reference model.

Good to know: the acronym HERMES stands for “Handbuch der Elektronischen Rechenzentren des Bundes, eine Methode zur Entwicklung von Systemen” (handbook of the Confederation's electronic data centres, a method for developing systems). HERMES is the official standard for project management in the Swiss federal administration and is also used in many cantons, municipalities and companies.

More about HERMES

Internal milestone A defined point within the concrete project execution, for example the end of an analysis, a design, a test or a sprint. In the reference model, internal milestones are distinguished from the higher-level management milestones.

Lessons learned Lessons learned means deliberately recording experiences from a project: what worked, what did not, and what would we do the same or differently next time? The value only arises when these insights are actually available again and used in the next project.

Management milestone A defined decision or leadership point in the course of a project. What is checked is not only whether subject-matter work has been completed, but whether the preconditions for the next step are in place and the undertaking continues to be supported. In the reference model, management milestones lie along the arc from the project impulse to use; their concrete design is specific to the organisation.

Maturity level The maturity level describes how far an organisation has come in deliberately shaping and recording its handling of projects. I distinguish six levels: person-dependent, documented, standardised, measurable, digitally supported and self-learning. The maturity level is not a grade but a map for the next sensible development step. It refers to the maturity of the organisation in handling projects as a whole, not to the maturity of individual process phases or roles.

Method neutrality Method neutrality means that a company is not forced to adopt a particular project management method. Existing or desired approaches, phases and milestones can be classified and mapped in an organisation-specific way. Method-neutral does not mean structureless: the reference model creates a shared leadership framework.

PMI-based approach PMI stands for Project Management Institute. PMI is not a single project management method but an international professional organisation that develops standards, bodies of knowledge and qualifications for project management. The PMBOK Guide is particularly well known. “PMI-based” means a company-specific approach oriented to PMI standards and concepts. Such a design can also be accommodated in the reference model.

Portfolio / project portfolio The project portfolio is the overall view of an organisation's projects and undertakings. Portfolio management decides which undertakings are started, prioritised, postponed or ended and how they contribute to the strategy and available resources.

Premortem A premortem is a thinking tool before an important project decision. Those involved imagine that the undertaking has failed in the future and write down what could have led to it. The purpose is to make doubts and risks visible before a decision is made.

PRINCE2 PRINCE2 is an internationally widespread project management method. It places great emphasis on clear roles and responsibilities, traceable decisions, the continuous business justification of a project and controlled management from stage to stage. An important idea is tailoring: the method is adapted to size, complexity, risk and environment.

Principles of action / cornerstones Principles of action are a few load-bearing guard rails by which people can align their decisions. They differ from an extensive set of rules because they also provide orientation in new situations. The terms principles of action and cornerstones mean the same thing.

Process model / project method A process model describes how a project is fundamentally handled and can contain phases, work steps, roles, results and decision points. A project method can additionally specify principles, practices and leadership logic. In practice, the terms are not always clearly separated. What matters is that different organisations may use different paths.

Project / the new A project is a time-limited undertaking with a specific result and its own coordination task. The more accessible expression “the new” refers to the uniqueness or particular nature of the specific undertaking, not automatically to a change business. This covers internal changes, system introductions, product development and construction projects as well as customer orders that are carried out as projects in the core business.

Project impulse The project impulse is the starting point of a possible project. It can be an idea, a problem, an opportunity, a customer requirement, a strategic initiative or a necessary change. A project impulse is not yet a project order; first it must be clarified whether it should actually become an undertaking.

Project management Project management is an organisation's deliberate and orderly handling of projects. It covers not only scheduling or leading an individual project team, but also selection, governance, roles, reliable leadership information, approaches, tools and learning from undertakings.

Project type / type of undertaking A project type describes a group of projects with similar characteristics, such as IT development projects, construction projects, procurement projects, and organisational and change projects. Different project types do not necessarily need the same internal execution.

Reference class forecasting Reference class forecasting supplements a project's inside view with the outside view of genuinely comparable undertakings. Instead of only asking how long one's own project will probably take, one looks at how comparable projects actually turned out in reality.

Reference model The reference model is a generic leadership framework for projects. It gives company management a shared view of projects, even though individual undertakings may have different project types and approaches. It spans the arc from the project impulse through initialisation, concept, realisation and introduction to use, and shows management milestones along the way.

RUP RUP stands for Rational Unified Process and comes from software development. RUP combines an overarching phase structure with iterative development: a solution emerges step by step in several cycles. The four basic phases are usually called inception, elaboration, construction and transition.

SAFe SAFe stands for Scaled Agile Framework. It is a framework for coordinating agile and lean ways of working beyond individual teams in larger organisational contexts. It links teamwork with overarching planning, portfolio steering and shared decision-making and leadership structures.

SIA SIA stands for the Swiss Society of Engineers and Architects. SIA is not a single general project management method. In Swiss construction and planning, SIA standards and service models structure, among other things, phases, roles and services in the planning and realisation of construction projects.

Sunk costs Sunk costs are resources that have already been spent and cannot be recovered. In project decisions they easily lead to the error of thinking: “We have already invested so much, we cannot stop now.” For the decision to continue, however, what counts is the expected future benefit in relation to the resources still required.

Tailoring Tailoring means deliberately adapting an existing approach to the concrete context. Not every project needs the same amount of documentation, roles, controls or work steps. Tailoring is a deliberate adaptation, not an arbitrary dissolution of the method.

The proven By the proven I mean what passes permanently into an organisation's normal operations after a successful project. A project creates something new; when its result is introduced, used and becomes part of normal work, it becomes something proven.

Why, How, What The idea comes from Simon Sinek's Golden Circle. I adopt the sequence but deliberately use the terms more narrowly: Why stands for culture and identity, How for governance and principles of action, What for concrete implementation in operations and in projects.

Your own approach Not every company works according to a named external method. Many organisations have developed their own approach over the years, with their own project phases, roles, decision points, templates, reports and tools, or with elements of different methods. What matters is whether it suits the organisation, is understandable and can be applied reliably.

What the book says. Collins studied companies that made the leap from good to outstanding performance over a number of years and compared them with similar companies that did not make the leap.

What I do not adopt. The method as proof. According to the critics, it lacks scientific rigour, the design is susceptible to confirmation bias, and the selection was made on the basis of the outcome. Several of the companies studied later failed. Collins explains this by their departure from the principles, which is plausible but not an independent confirmation.

What the book says. Trust is not a soft issue but a factor of speed. Where it is lacking, everything becomes slower and more expensive. Where it is present, much can be done without safeguards.

What I adopt. The idea that trust arises from experience and not from assurances. It underpins my approach of making a collaboration tangible in practice early on, in a clearly limited first work step.

What I do not adopt. The claim to measurability. It is a management book of the same kind as Collins's.

What the approach says. Anyone who wants change does not have to dissect the problem. Instead, they describe the solution. The miracle question invites people to imagine a future in which the difficulty has been resolved.

What I adopt. The attitude that the means for the solution are already present, and the second perspective in Chapter 11.

What I do not adopt. Dispensing with understanding. De Shazer works with people on change. These pages are aimed at people who decide on an investment, and that decision needs an understanding of the connections, otherwise it is not their own.

What I adopt. The first perspective in Chapter 11 and the basic attitude of this publication: it does not begin with what is missing.

What I do not adopt. Nothing, but I do not claim any evidential force either. It is an attitude.

What the book says. Effective organisations think from the inside out: from the Why through the How to the What.

What I adopt. The basic idea of the sequence. (Chapter 5)

What I do not adopt. The breadth of the terms. I define them more narrowly; here the How is governance. The exact distinction is in the glossary. There is no strong empirical basis for the Golden Circle.

What the book says. Human judgement follows patterns that are useful in many situations and systematically misleading in others.