This is a new Tag for the Herding Cats blog. I've had a conversation on Twitter that started with
Management installs programs to solve problems on an ad hoc basis or to move the company along instead of adjusting the company culture to meet the realities of the marketplace. — Philip B Crosby
Where I work we don't build consumer products, we don't provide consumer-facing services, we're not a staff augmentation firm, we don't have a marketing focus. We're a Professional Services firm. We're a collection of colleagues who have worked together for several decades in the same profession. That profession is called Program Planning and Controls in most domains and our work usually lives in the Finance and Business Operations department of the firm we're engaged with.
The discussion quickly went downhill, like many on Twitter, when I suggested the inverse is actually true in our domain. I live in a state that has the second largest Federal Footprint outside of Washington DC. We have 2 of the 3 prime defense contractors, most of the mutual fund vendors, we're on the 40th parallel which is the perfect stop of earth stations communicating for low earth orbit, so TV and Intelligence agencies have their people here. We have many of the California BioPharma firms since we have no earthquakes. And of course more than our share of startups equal to Silicon Valley and Austin.
I work primarily in the Software Intensive System of Systems domain, applied to Space, Defense, and Fed-Civ acquisition. Here's a quick background on what we do in that SISoS domain. Yes that IT annual budget is $81,600,000,000. That's 81 Billion with a B. I'm not saying our domain is the norm. But it is actually the norm in our locale and the cities we travel to where the Federal Acquisition Regulation drives the culture of the firms producing the solutions procured by Federal and State agencies.
My response to the Orginal Post was
Process drives culture
That resulted in pushback claiming - No culture must be adjusted to the marketplace.
Here's my take
- When a regulatory environment is the basis of everything that takes place at the workplace, the culture is driven by how the firm complies with those regulations and the processes, procedures, tools, and people interacting while doing the work prescribed in the contract issued by the acquisition community of the sovereign defining those regulations.
- At one firm we have a three-ring binder, a couple 100 pages thick titles Program Performance Management Process Description. The joke is it's in a 3 ring binder so you can hit someone on the side of the head when it's discovered they aren't following whats in the PPMPD.
- The three tier-one space and defense contractors here in town have different ways of working their programs. If you looked at the processes used to manage the program, and you knew what the PPMPD's looked like, you could tell who was the Prime Contractor. Their signature would be on the artifacts and processes.
- The OP appears to focus on consumer products, where market forces drive the processes and the resulting culture. In other domains, A&D, Heavy Construction, processes drive the culture. The reason is market forces are a second-order effect on the firm. A&D and EPC firms are working for the buyer of the solution, not for the direct end user of the solution. The solution can be a spacecraft, a highway, a highrise, an aircraft or ship. These solutions are acquired through a contract to provide a collection of capabilities stated in the RFP. This is especially true in the A&D acquisition process where I work.
The Learning
Rarely can any statement standalone without first stating the domain in which that statement is applicable
