I recently blogged about the younger, faster generation entering the project workforce. This is the generation that Jim Carroll has written about in his foreword to the book Rise of the Project Workforce, entitled "Don’t mess with my powder, dude." These people want to go snowboarding, or do whatever else they like to do—and they don’t have much patience for hierarchical “matrix” organizations that are not agile.

I use the term “horizontal empowerment” to describe how companies must push the decision-making processes “down the org chart” if they want to be agile and competitive. If decision making is slow, not only will the new project workforce lose patience and work somewhere else, but the new generation of extremely demanding and highly informed customers will lose patience, too.

At our user conference September 26, our own Mike McRae, VP of Professional Services, used the Tenrox service delivery teams as an example of “horizontal empowerment.” Mike described how we tie the compensation of our project managers to both utilization rates and customer satisfaction, and give the PMs full ownership of the team that delivers our services to the customer.

Before this change, we were in a never-ending cycle of "passing the buck": our support managers and staff would blame the consultants when things went wrong; and consultants and the consulting manager would blame the enterprise solutions team (who works on customizations, integration and reporting).

But today, Mike has implemented a new structure. The project manager directly manages a customer project team that consists of a business analyst, a technical consultant, an enterprise solutions developer, and a support representative. By creating cross-functional teams and empowering their managers, Mike was able to move the responsibility and decision-making down, where it belongs, in a flat world.

Mike said in his talk:

“I used to have to worry about customer satisfaction and billable utilization. Plus, I was constantly revising processes and controls to balance these two often conflicting metrics. Now, it’s up to our project managers to balance them for each project. As a result, Tenrox saw both utilization and customer satisfaction jump in the past year. And, by empowering the project managers and their teams they are more motivated and re-energized."

It is not enough to just push down the decision making authority: project managers need access to the right information for making informed decisions. In a future post, I will describe how we have accomplished this by replacing time-consuming meetings with informative dashboards.