How often have you wished that the project team that you work on or with could make more thoughtful and conscientious project-level decisions?
What would it be like to have a completely independent, well-informed project team, capable of weighing a multitude of options, acting in accordance with the core values and business principles of your organization, and routinely making decisions that benefit the project — in some cases against their own individual selfish short-term interests?
Imagine an entire organization made up of teams such as this. Teams that make these decisions, the ones that you have faith they would, without the need to seek the permission of their management structure.
Over the last few years this has been an overarching drive and target at P’unk Ave. — decentralizing and distributing the activities traditionally held by a project manager to the teams themselves.
We’ve focused on establishing autonomous, multidisciplinary project teams who are aligned with our vision, share core underlying values, and are empowered to make the best possible choices.
While having a shared perspective and uniform understanding of this approach has helped us navigate many hurdles, cohesion hasn’t always come easily. But it has come.
As I write this post, we have four self-sufficient and incredibly talented project teams (each with three or four people). Who are successfully executing on dozens of projects, interacting directly with clients, all with very little outside oversight.
When these teams need guidance, support, or advice our shop’s leadership, their colleagues, and co-workers are here to support them. But by no means a filter through which they are required to squeeze their work.