ENGLUND PROJECT MANAGEMENT CONSULTANCY WW.ENGLUNDPMC.COM 1 Executive Imperatives: Necessary Ingredients to Improve Organizational Performance by Randall L. Englund and Ralf Müller A widespread desire to improve organizational performance may be sated by focusing on a key set of executive imperatives—necessary and high priority actions. Personal experiences reveal that an essential focus on creating excellence in people, processes, and the working environment reaps tremendous benefits and enables executives and their organizations to achieve desired objectives. From our long careers as program managers in high tech new product development and from working with a wide variety of organizations world-wide, we observed a wealth of executive practices, some effective for improving organizational performance and many not. A distillation of executive imperatives provides fodder for achieving more optimized results. A search for and concerted effort to improve project management is an internal activity within an organization aimed at operational effectiveness. This is a necessary but not sufficient effort to create a truly excellent organization. What is also required is an overt, explicit effort to achieve successful outcomes THROUGH project management. When executives in an organization come to recognize the importance and phenomenal contribution of project, program and portfolio management, they benefit from bountiful harvests. Creating excellence IN project management occurs when sponsors appoint appropriate project leaders and they apply methodologies, viewpoints, insights, and leading practices to optimize project-based work. This goal is necessary because projects are the means to achieve almost anything in every organization. Without good project, program, and portfolio management, achieving results is tenuous. Traditional efforts are not sufficient in an environment where internal and external forces are both driving and restraining performance in an accelerating manner. Organizational maturity requires that executives reduce organizational “toxins” and create “green” organizations, using a systemic approach. Assess the Environment The imperative facing executives in all organizations is not only to embark on a quest to manage project management processes, but also to create a “green ecosystem” as an environment that encourages project-based work and to eliminate pollutants and “toxic” actions that demotivate project managers and their teams. This means searching with unrelenting curiosity for leading practices. It also means, when these practices are revealed, that executives are prepared to take action. Progressively improving practices, also called organizational maturity, requires that project leaders and management reduce organizational “toxins” and create “green” organizations. “Green” in this context extends the physical, tangible thinking about project work into the non-