The Case For Becoming a Project-Based Org

[MUSIC] Deals not just another payroll platform, it's one your team might actually enjoy. HR, IT, and payroll together finally. Built in-house, built for peace of mind. Visit d-e-l.com/hbrpodcast. [MUSIC] I'm Allison Beard. I'm Adi Ignatius and this is the HR Idea Cast. [MUSIC] Adi, one of the biggest goals for organizations today is to become more nimble. So you can quickly respond to change, constantly capitalize on new opportunities, and continuously transform your business as the market demands. So we talk about that a lot, right? We need to be more nimble, but how do you actually do that? Well, our guest today argues that the best way is by moving to a more project-driven model of work. Up and down the organization from the corporate level to individual teams. He wants us to both ruthlessly prioritize as well as stay fluid so that we're identifying strategic goals, assembling teams to go after them, evaluating as we go, and then either continuing, shifting, or disbanding based on our outcomes. So that sounds really positive and sends different from the traditional model of maintaining and growing operations, managing talent. It also sounds really hard. Yes, and I think we know that from experience having worked on projects ourselves. But our guest today, Antonio Nieto Rodriguez, has studied a bunch of companies around the world who have adopted this model organization-wide. And he's here to give us a play-by-play on how leadership, org design, and ideas about value creation need to change in order to make that happen. And to reap the benefits, which he says are both financial in terms of new revenue streams, but also psychological in terms of more energized and engaged employees. So here's my conversation with Antonio Nieto Rodriguez, CEO of Projects and Company, and author of the HPR article, The Project-Driven Organization, as well as the book Powered by Projects, leading your organization in the transformation age. Antonio, thanks so much for being on the show. Thank you for inviting me. So Project Management has been your life's work for decades. What is different now in early 2026 than even a few years ago in terms of how companies need to think about projects? Alison, I'm sure you've experienced that too. I think you see more projects and you see longer projects, projects that never end. So I think what we've seen over the last five years is that it's just more difficult to manage. And people are getting a bit saturated over the old and I think there's a need for doing projects for sure. This is critical. Projects are your future, but in different ways. My first book, which was called the Project in Handbook, was for practitioners, for people who are leading managing projects, many of them are part time project managers because they have a daily job. With this one, I'm talking to the senior leaders, to the CEO, to the executives. And I'm telling them the world has changed so they also need to change and spend more time doing transformation work, projects. They need to shape their culture. They need to shape their organization, their structure, their performance indicators. Is that sort of lack of senior leadership understanding involvement really organizing the company around project? Is the fact that it's not yet that way the reason most projects still fail? I would say a big part of projects fail because of either the leadership doesn't know what the role is and they play a very important role in two ways. First on prioritizing deciding which projects go and which projects don't go or how to cancel projects because it should be very natural. It doesn't happen, but these are the senior leaders who decide. And then once you decide to launch an initiative or a project, you need to get involved first well. That means dedicating part of your time to pushing forward projects that often go across the partimental across the world and they don't do that enough. So that's the two big areas where the leaders should be playing a more active role. If an organization wants to move from sort of an operational mindset to one that is much more project oriented, what is the first step? I talk about culture. I think for me the first step is understanding that your culture has to be different. And by culture I mean that it's possible that some of the projects will fail and you need to embrace it, allowing people to take risks. I also think that most of the projects that we do currently in organizations across the world, they're incremental improvements. The nice part about projects, they allow you to think exponentially. So allowing people to think broad. And the sponsorship should be going along that. So the first step is working on your culture, allowing a more project oriented culture so that people get comfortable with the things I just mentioned. For companies that have already moved to sort of a very traditional organizational structure to something like Agile, how is this the next step? Like how is this an evolution from that? Well I think Agile has been great and Agile has been there for 20 years. I think majority of companies have embraced some of the Agile philosophy or principles which is about customer's centrity, not so much around the process. They work in smaller teams, not huge teams and they also work on iterations. So disrupting a bit like you were saying, Alisson, the more traditional hierarchical, silo-based organizations, but that's not enough to bring an organization to feel comfortable with change, to be good at constant transformation. For that you need something bigger. And that's where I came with the concept of project driven. Take some of the philosophy of Agile, but bring it at scale so you can work with transversal teams. You can do transformation one after the other, different. This is just bringing a different way of working, a different organization type to embrace what I call the transformation age. We are living in a world of change and that will not go backwards. Unfortunately, we're in the past operations where the core part of your business where most of the value was generating, producing, selling products or services in this project-based organization. The project becomes your core value drivers. Your operations are become more like a commodity. You need to have them, but it should not be the core focus or the core place where you spend most of your time. And it might be obvious, but the driver of this is the rapid pace of technological change. The rapid pace of change, the rapid pace of new technology, the rapid pace of new disruptions, but there's another big point. Most of the operational work. So basically, people that do the same all the time when they go to work, they work with their same people, they do very similar activities on the time. That work will be done very soon by robots and AI. So the piece of operations that used to have the majority of humans working on that, that's going to disappear. So in banks, for example, today, there's very few people working in the operations. This is all run by IT and technology. So the future of work is project-based. We're going to just jump and spend time on projects as our core time area. We should not be doing operation tasks anymore. So that's the other big change, Alice, on that. The type of work is shifting from operations-based repetitive, very focused, to more project-based, which is more fluid. We don't know what will happen in six months, so you don't have roles for two years. It's a bit uncomfortable, but brings a lot of opportunities. So rather than laying all those people off because their operational work can be automated, you're redeploying them to innovation and the one thing that humans still do better than AI, which is create something new. Absolutely. So the core message and the research that I found was when you do this transformation is not about getting rid of all your operational people. And there will be thousands of people that will need to be redeployed. So the key success factor is that you give these people the opportunity to transform themselves to do repetitive tasks, to do some more challenging innovation, I think, in the end. We're all a bit creative, and that's the big, big message I want to share is, don't see this as a cost-cutting exercise. It's not. It's about re-skilling, upskilling, and the companies that I talk in the book, that's what they did. One of them hired, hired, very famous for their business model. They have lots of entrepreneurs. nurse, micro-enterprises, and you allow people to have even meaningful work because you know, Alisson, people don't go to work because they're passionate, they go because they need the money. So, we can give more meaning to the people work when they're working on something that has impact where they're empowered to take decisions, they might benefit from the returns. That's for me the really positive side, but the change and the jump is huge. Let's dig into what companies need to do to move to this more project-driven model. You talk about three buckets, organizational redesign, leadership, and value creation. Let's start with the first. How does an organization need to redesign itself to make this work? So there's three aspects I cover here. It's the culture. We talk about that having that more facility for people to take risks and failures is regularly rewarded and also exponential mindset so that we think beyond the traditional improvements, the second and the most difficult for me is the structure. Structure means hierarchy. And hierarchy is power. And I think leading change has to come from the top. So people are not so free giving their power away. So the structure is the worst thing that can happen if you want to lead projects transversally because it slows you down. The last piece on that bucket is governance. Governance is the big meetings that leaders have to follow up progress. It has been very operational to ribbon, monthly review meetings, annual review meetings, and so on. It has to be much more flexible. You said the most difficult one is the hierarchy, the structure. So what advice do you give organizations on that? So this is interesting because that's where you get the bigger resistance. And often you get resistance from the people and employees and middle managers. Here you get resistance from the top, right? Because you're telling them, okay, you need to work differently. My advice is stars more. So don't go the next day and say today we're not going to have any hierarchy in this company and there's no job descriptions will figure out. No, what you want to do is take one of the most important transformation initiatives that you're doing. And that team you empower fully. They can decide 90% of the things they can't take decisions. They can't move fast. They might check with one senior leader, the sponsor once in a while. But you leave them free though and they get priority on any their request. So you experiment with one only and that will lead to good results and people will say, oh, what's going on there? This is going fast and this is really nice. So it will create like a snowball effect. But don't try to remove hierarchy from one day to another because that's really cow. Stars more, but show that this no effect can lead the rest of the organization towards that more project based organization. Okay. In the second bucket leadership, how does leadership change, you know, from the CEO all the way down to the line manager? That's for me the one that can have the bigger impact from my experience talking to large organizations, senior leaders. Somehow they prefer to spend most of their time, including the CEOs on the things they already know. They're comforts on and their comforts on for senior leaders is running the business, running the operations. Most of them came through the ranks through operations because they were very good at one piece of the operations, the finance, the operations itself, the sales. And they really feel very uncomfortable when they have to work in transformation initiatives because they need to really become leaders without hierarchies and contribute and share ideas and let other people take decisions. For me, the leaders is where the biggest change happened is how much of your week do you spend in change projects and transformation? We did a research for the book and it was a really 80% of the senior leaders were spending less than half a day in transformation work. Four days and a half on day to day activities operations, right? And I would say at least half of your time, if not more, three days out of it, you need to spend it in that zone where every day is different. There's a lot of uncertain things. You need quick decision making. Maybe you don't have clarity on the status, but you need to keep pushing. Sometimes you need to stop the project. For me, that's the biggest piece on the leadership. It includes priorityization. That's the other big topic. You need to say no. You need to say these are the top three initiatives that we're going to invest these next six months. And unfortunately, there's struggle with that as well. They want to do everything and hope one or two will succeed. People cannot cope with that. We need to be more strong on the priorities. I call it ruthless priorityization. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That makes sense. Another term you use is strategic fluidity, which sounds highly uncomfortable if you're a CEO or in the C-suite, because it's really difficult to communicate a vision to your employees and your shareholders if you are being flexible about your strategy based on the results that you're getting from these transformation projects. So how do you deal with that? Yeah, so there's much more uncertainty and you need much more trust. This is your trusting the team. You're trusting that at the end of the day. That's where we will create the value. And I think this goes along what we just talked before, the speed of change. They were talking about big bets. You will not see immediate results in any project. It takes commitment to spend at least six months to start seeing some values. And you see that from very successful companies where they focus more on the long term. I think Amazon is one great example. No, they were looking at the long term. This is where we want to go. We want to be the best on that piece. We want to build this transformation capacity so that we can adapt. So we're measuring performance differently. And this is where boards, shareholders, they need to be more patient. They need to trust that if the elements are in place, we're going to be successful. On the prioritization piece, what recommendations do you give about how senior leaders first decide what projects to start? Because you want them to be focused and targeted and not say yes to everything. And then secondly, decide when something needs a little bit more time or actually you should just cut your losses. Yeah. And we had an article in HBR about this on stopping projects. But let me bring it very simple to the listener. I asked two questions to a board of directors or executives. How often do you launch new initiatives, new projects in your organization? They say maybe we launch twice per month. And they're very proud because launching projects mean that you're taking risks, you're innovative. But then I asked how often do you finish them or you close them? And they looked at each other. So maybe I think the last time we finished a project was six months ago. So if you launch more projects than you finish, you have a big problem because capacity is already at its full. So knowing that before we know some new initiative, we need to stop two or three to give space within the organization. That is already a big game changer. Right people will notice that first we finish what we start or we stop it because it's possible that we wanted to invest in this technology. And six months later there's something better, cheaper and more performing. So this is really important. I always say that today I can go to any organization and we could cancel 80% of the projects and nothing will happen. That's another exercise that you can go. I think to cancel 80% of the projects and I use the purpose. The purpose is very important to prioritize what's the purpose of our business because the goals might change but your purpose should not change. So if you use your purpose to be the best on something, be recognized for something, that will help you to eliminate almost half of your projects and the new ones should be linked to that big focus, which is your purpose. When you're describing this very fluid world, very innovative world and I understand your point about how employees will feel energized by that. But also it's quite uncomfortable. There's value in doing something that you've done for a really long time well as opposed to this new world where I'm assigned to one project and it might be successful but if it's not I'm going to move to another one. When you've worked with companies on these kinds of changes, how have you seen in terms of how the employees react and how the leaders bring them along to make sure that they are enjoying it? I think you touched on one of the most critical pieces and it has connotations on human resources, on the future work, on the type of work that people will be doing and I give you just a personal example. Alisson, a very good friend was working in a big French bank, Global Bank. He was doing 25 years of the same. He was head of risk management for loans and mortgages and at one point the bank decided we don't need people here. I think we can do all this with IT and automation. So they call my friends, say, "As from tomorrow, do and your team will be displaced." And he got into a big transformation project across Europe. And he called me, said, "Antonio, I've never been "borking in projects full time. "Can you help me? "I'm scared. "I liked the day today. "I was very good." And then I sent him, of course, the HBR handbook, and he loved that. And just two months later, he told me, "Antonio, can we talk?" I said, "Yes, I love my new job. "I'm meeting people from all over the place. "They're all different. "Every day is different. "They're challenges. "I'm using my brain. "We're working in teams." So I would say the majority people, if you support them from transitioning, from repetitive tasks to something that requires for them to use their skills and their knowledge and working in teams, human people. We love to work in teams when people trust us and we have a role to play. It just leads to a more meaningful job. But I'm afraid that some leaders will see this as a cost-cutting exercise. And that will put people in resistance, scare, and that should not be, I think, the future of work based on projects can be really meaningful and personal growth is huge. - And it sounds like you're advocating for people to do this with internal talent, rather than hiring gig workers or using consultants. You see the project-driven organization is still providing full-time employment to people? - Yeah, and this is something that I highlight and with some big corporates we discuss this. And for the last 20 years, maybe, since change became such an important and transformation became so present, most large companies meet size companies. They have outsourced the transformation work to consultants and they were doing the big changes while the internal people were doing the day-to-day, and they were comfortable with that. If there's one big thing that leader need to know in the next year or twist, build those transformation capabilities, I call it transformation muscles within their people. They need to get comfortable with change that need to thrive in change and in transformation and in projects. We still need consultants not to do the heavy lifting of transformation, but to give you some advice, to do some conch in mentoring, but I think that's the bigger change I see is companies and leaders need to build their transformation muscles urgently. Otherwise, they will struggle for sure. And just to finish on this point, if you look globally, Asia companies, they're already there. They have lean structures, they have their transformation capabilities within, their leaders know what to do. And I'm a bit worried based in Europe, in Spain, and looking at North America, that we take things a bit slow. So I'm a bit afraid that we need to move faster. - So that brings us nicely to the third bucket of things that need to shift within your organization to be more project-driven value creation. So what needs to change specifically there? - So here there's two main areas. We still need operations. You still need to produce your goods or deliver your services. But what I say is this has to be less core and more modular. So how can we buy capacity externally? It happens in some industries, right? You don't have all the full capacity. So having that flexibility for your operations, being able to outsource, operations are needed, but it shouldn't be the focus and it should be much more flexible. And the second is about execution. So here is about how can we generate value faster? Here you introduce artificial intelligence to the liver and more of the tasks that currently are done by the people, right? So all the admin, some decision-making risk analysis, this can be done by AI. So the execution piece to go faster, create more value for the organization or for society. But it's about which methods do we use? We have the project canvas that I covered in my earlier book, but also some ideas around. You should never have projects longer than six months because the work changes so fast. So having some new concepts and tools for leaders and people working in transformation to make them better. - So it's always iterative. - Always iterative, always having margin for stopping a project, always having the opportunity to accelerate and what are the tools that work and supporting people, building those competencies and executing their projects successfully because that's another big issue, around 80% of transformation work failed. So if you do half of it better, you're going to be better. So how can we do that? - So what tangible benefits have you seen when companies have reorganized this way, shifted their leadership, started measuring and creating value in a different way? - There's financial benefits. For example, higher, a Chinese conglomerate who's in consumer goods, electronics, they move very quickly their example for me in the book. And in this new model, they triple the profit within five years. So there's really profit tangible. Buyern, the German company that produces the aspirants, they also are moving into this concept, they're aiming to reduce cost by two billion by replacing and working in small teams for 90 days, self-directed. Another and last one I want to share, I like SpaceX for their dedicated teams, they had fully dedicated and their exponential thinking. They said, "Why don't we build rackets that you can reuse instead of dropping them?" So that exponential thinking has brought SpaceX to something we've never seen, but the most important benefit that I see across the companies that I research for the book is, people are proud to work for those companies. I go to work and I love it. And I'm doing something with meaning. It just makes me really happy when you can see people enjoying what they do at work. And that would for me, the cherry or the core driver for these changes is also that. The people being proud and fully satisfied with the work they do. What are some of the other really big challenges where you've seen organizations who've tried to do this stumble or fail? I think not being full in, being patient as well, these changes require some time, maybe six months, give it nine months to start seeing some results and seeing some positive and some very, so that lack of patient is a big issue, lack of sponsorship from the top. If the leaders say we go this direction, but they don't behave like that, it's a big challenge. And the cultural aspects as well, at least some people are afraid of change. Unless we really are clear, transparent, as these changes for real, these changes needed. You know back to the COVID, we knew it was urgent and it was a survival thing. So we all change. And we accepted the change in a matter of a day or two. We were all working from home and helping each other. So this is a bit similar. We need to see this as a very necessary change for organizations, for ourselves, for our careers to be in the right place where I think the future is leading us. And that would be the bigger challenge, the cultural aspects. And for those listeners who aren't in the sea suite of their companies, is it possible to move to this type of model on a single team or within a certain function or region, even if it's not a company-wide transformation and then try to filter it up? I've seen cases where somebody takes a role in a transformation leader position in the region. And they say, I want to try these. I want to have fully dedicated team. I want to empower the teams. I want to take decisions. I want to move fast. I want to involve. So you can try it. And you can say, I want to be the guinea pig. I want to be the MVP. I want to try it. And I would recommend highly for anybody listening to us who has this role of project leader, transformation leader to be courageous enough to talk to your leaders. Say, listen, I want to try this. I want to take the risk. And by the way, I need you, senior leader, to support me as well. There's a big role that you can play. This is what I expect from you. Let's work together. It's not for me. It's not for you. It's for the company that we work. And I think this is the nice thing about projects that you have a lot of power in terms of stopping a project. Instead of asking for help instead of getting resources from parts of the organization. And we need to see a role much more brother than just delivering one project. We can make change happen in the organization. We can make change happen. Well, we all need to do that. So Antonio, thank you for helping us figure out how to do it. Thank you, Alyson. Always a pleasure. That's Antonio Niatto Rodriguez, author of the HBR article, "The Project Driven Organization and the Book Powered by Projects," leading your organization in the transformation age. If you found this episode helpful, share it with a colleague and be sure to subscribe and rate IDA cast in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. if you want. help leaders move the world forward, please consider subscribing to Harvard Business Review. You'll get access to the HBR mobile app, the weekly exclusive insider newsletter, and unlimited access to HBR Online, just head to hbr.org/subscribe. Thanks to our team, Senior Producer Mary Do, Audio Product Manager Ian Fox, and Senior Production Specialist Rob Eckhart. And thanks to you for listening to the HBR IDA cast. We'll be back with a new episode on Tuesday. I'm Allison Beard. [Music]