Hosts Merv Jersak and Tim Jerome explore the significance of cultural awareness in project management, highlighting the essential role it plays in successful project delivery. They discuss the definition of culture within project environments, its dual nature involving both project-specific and overarching organizational influences, and share personal experiences illustrating the impact of cultural factors on project performance. The conversation delves into the tools and skills needed to identify, assess, and shape project cultures for optimized teamwork and productivity, emphasizing the importance of emotional intelligence, flexibility, and situational awareness.

Main Take-Aways

As project managers, we must learn how to assess and create project culture, understanding the positive and potentially negative influences culture can have on project success:

• what we mean by project culture and the need for cultural awareness
• understanding the influences both within and from outside the project
• challenges of integrating multiple organizational cultural norms and standards into a single project culture
• understanding that project culture provides both opportunities for success as well as potential hinderances to productivity
• assessing and contributing to project culture
• skills required to assess and assimilate into a project culture
• flexibility in working with different generational norms within a single project
• PMI’s shift from a process focus to a people-centered focus and the influence on developing project culture

Show Notes

Today’s Project Managers Coffee Chat: Navigating Cultural Dynamics in Project Management

00:27 Introducing the week’s topic on understanding cultural awareness and influences in projects.

00:53 Setting the base definition for what Tim and Merv mean by culture as it pertains to the projects you lead.

02:21 Further defining project by noting the influence of the overarching organizational culture.

02:59 Merv and Tim both share experiences of their real-world examples of project culture – one of “work hard, play hard”, one of unintended elitism.

05:43 The challenge of two different organizational cultures coming together on a project, with the intent of forming a collaborative working project culture.

07:07 Project culture can hinder project effectiveness as well present opportunity for successful collaboration and great results.

09:06 Where does project culture come from? How does it develop? How can you assess it in order to assimilate into the project in an optimum way? How can you contribute to its development? (Think emotional intelligence, active listening, etc.).

12:39 Learning how to fit into a project culture through your observational skills, situational awareness, asking questions, environmental clues, etc.

16:12 Being flexible in working with generational differences, accommodating working styles, while maintaining productivity of the entire project team.

18:22 Project Management Institute’s focus on process in earlier editions of the Body of Knowledge versus the more people-centric, principles-based 7th edition is shifting how project cultures develop among project teams.

21:21 Conclusion and upcoming topics regarding cultural awareness on IT projects.