Strategic visioning and strategic planning are all too rare in all industries, and ours is no exception. Most organizations are momentum-driven and don’t pay enough attention to strategic planning. Upper-level management does not push innovation or quality improvements because they don’t impact the short term enough. Too often, we do business by looking at individual results, and pay too little attention to the quality of our processes and systems. Focusing on individual results causes the following problems:

1.       Tunnel Vision: Individual entities work to meet their own goals and ignore how they may impact the peripheral organizations and groups on projects. Sometimes distortions and errors on the work performed by one organization cause numerous other participants to struggle to survive them. Then the cycle becomes self-reinforcing as they must integrate the sub-quality work they received into their own processes, forcing them to struggle to meet their goals.

2.       Conflict: The goals that direct one unit’s short-term gain typically contradict the goals of another unit. There are countless examples of politics being emphasized over sound policy, civil designers not delivering what construction crews need, and construction companies shortcutting the construction process to save time and money, thereby decreasing the long-term quality and sustainability of the project.

3.       Insincerity: Individual goals that conflict with other participants’ goals force people to act in potentially insincere ways to work around issues and people that “stand in their way” rather than working to improve understanding. This fosters guarded communication and minor – sometimes major – dishonesty.

Each of these problems compounds the others, disguising the true shape of our industry. People think they are doing a great job – and they are – by their own standards. This approach typically reflects well on the individual entities within a project and reinforces the legitimacy of their single-minded goals. When goals are met, organizations can boast of good performance. They are doing little to aid the overall success of the project however, and they add long-term cost, manifested in many different forms, to the projects and to the industry. This type of attitude degrades project quality throughout the process. Too often, individuals and organizations lose sight of the larger purpose of the work they do.

As an industry, we must begin to shift our evaluation from individual results to quality systems. The quality of what comes out of a process is determined by the quality of what goes in and what happens at every step along the way. Achieving quality means that problems get solved, not covered up. In order for each organization to build quality into every system, we must work in partnership with internal and external clients to determine their needs. All of this requires more effective strategic visioning, planning and communication by the leaders of land development projects within each industry organization, and between organizations.

What About the Bottom Line?
Many private-sector organizations have trouble justifying why they should focus on improving processes and methods. Most organizations get caught up in a short-term, project-by-project mentality, which makes it difficult to justify spending unbillable hours on process improvements. Companies that focus on the short-term end result are analogous to trying to keep a dog happy by forcibly wagging its tail.

Focusing on strategic quality is the best way to improve the bottom line in a way that leverages itself and optimizes an organization’s long-term position. By focusing on quality, completing projects becomes replaced by completing projects that consistently and exactly suit the needs of all participants of the project, and are completed through a process that produces no errors, revisions, dissatisfaction, or lost time. Simply providing a “piece of the puzzle” becomes replaced by providing service that surpasses the expectations of the public, regulatory agencies and other clients by how well it meets their needs – even needs they hadn’t thought of.

With each improvement, processes become better executed. Productivity goes up and inefficiencies go down. Clients receive service of increasingly higher value at increasingly higher profit to each organization. Clients receiving high quality service spread the word and tell their colleagues, and demand for services increases.

Teamwork
Industry participants must work in new ways to replace barriers, rivalries, and distrust with true teamwork and partnerships. The partnerships formed must entail a mutual effort to please your common clients, not separate struggles for power and individual goals. This notion includes suppliers, regulatory bodies, and the public. Time and again, input is not gleaned from the public or regulatory agencies early enough in the process. As a result, conflicts arise later in the project that could have easily been avoided.

A group of people does not make a team. A team is a group of people with a high degree of interdependence geared towards the achievement of a goal or completion of a task for which they hold themselves mutually accountable. A team outperforms a group, and outperforms all reasonable expectations given to its individual members. A team has a synergistic effect – one plus one equals a lot more than two. An optimal team has:

    · a common goal - although a team may have a number of goals, one of them must stand out. This forms the basis for the identity of the team.

    · communication – open, honest and effective exchange of information between members. The more members of the team, the more time must be dedicated to communication.

    · trust – openness in critiquing and trusting others. Teams have a spirit that shows a sense of bonding and camaraderie.

    · resource optimization – optimal use of resources necessary to achieve the goal.

    · change compatibility – being flexible and assimilating change necessary for process improvement.

    · shared understanding – team members understand how to perform their individual roles, but also understand how others fulfill their roles, and how they can best help the overall process succeed.

It is rare in today’s environment that land development project teams perform optimally. Improvements cannot happen without a different view of our relationships between all partners throughout the project development, regulation, and management processes. SLDT