Establishing and maintaining the organization’s shared vision involves creating, communicating, using, and periodically evaluating and revising the shared vision. An organization’s shared vision captures the organization’s guiding principles including mission, objectives, expected behavior, and values. The shared visions of a project’s integrated teams should be consistent with the project’s shared vision, which in turn should be consistent with the organization’s shared vision.
Creating a shared vision involves establishing and actively maintaining agreement and commitment about what is to be done and how it will be accomplished, both procedurally and behaviorally. A shared vision is a result of an ongoing dialogue among all the people who will make it real. It continues to evolve as more ideas are shared.
The organization’s shared vision facilitates people working together, helps those people to attain unity of purpose, and creates a common understanding of the end state the organization is aiming to achieve. The organization’s shared vision must speak to every element of the organization. Effectively impacting the lowest levels of the organization necessitates impacting the highest levels as well. The organization’s leaders need to be role models for the actions of the organization. Their commitment to IPPD is critical to its success in the organization. They must clearly communicate their expectations for the organization’s projects and integrated teams and what the projects and integrated teams can expect from the management.
The organization’s shared vision needs to be grounded in reality. Organizations may be tempted to include in their shared vision broad statements about integrated teaming and employee empowerment. It is more important, however, to use the shared vision to set reasonable expectations on the rate of change in an organization. Unrealistic proclamations can transform the shared vision into a source of frustration and cause the organization to retreat from it after initial pilot demonstrations.
The organization’s shared vision should be articulated in sufficient detail to provide criteria against which the shared visions of the projects and integrated teams can be aligned. For example, the organization’s shared vision should address the use of integrated teams for projects, the focus on the customer, and the concurrent development of both product-related life-cycle processes and the product. These concepts should in turn be reflected in the shared visions of the projects and integrated teams. Guidelines for how projects and integrated teams should develop their shared visions should be made part of the organization’s process asset library.
Maintenance of the organization’s shared vision involves evaluating its use and currency. Results of evaluations may indicate the need to update the organization’s shared vision or to establish and maintain organizational practices and structures that implement the shared vision.