13 Project Management Overview

Strategic project management is the process of thinking about your organizational projects in light of their connection to your strategic plan. In other words, strategic project management is about forming clear links between your projects and strategic objectives.The premise of strategic project management is that ‘projects’ should actually work to achieve the goals and objectives outlined in your strategy. Strategic project management isn’t just about the process of project-managing big and important projects, it’s about designing and managing your entire suite of projects to so that it supports your strategy, by ensuring that:

• The mix of projects is appropriate and sufficient to deliver your strategic goals and objectives
• Your projects are appropriately resourced
• If timelines and resourcing have to be changed, projects are prioritized accordingly based on the strategic plan

We will examine the broad project management elements here, and as part of the weekly exercise, we will explore a specific project charter template you can use for projects as needed.

Getting started:

• Every active objective/goal/outcome needs at least one project – You may have future objectives that haven’t “started” yet, which is fine, but any “active” objective must have projects that will work towards completing the objective- otherwise you’re not actually working on it. Depending on how big your initiatives are, you may find you need to have sub-projects under projects to best represent how you intend to deliver the work
• The projects must deliver on the objectives – For each objective, you need to be able to indicate how you will know you have achieved the project’s goals and to what extent
• The projects shouldn’t “overlap” or be redundant – Look carefully at your project mix under each objective and across your strategy. Generally you should not be able to fully deliver on an objective without any one of its projects. You have to be prepared to remove or reduce scope on projects. Equally, make sure that you don’t have projects within or between objectives that “overlap” in scope, essentially duplicating work
• Every project must have a clear link to one or more objectives – Even if it isn’t directly linked to an objective, it has to clearly support what you’re trying to achieve. If you can draw a clear line from your projects to the areas it will improve, that’s an excellent indicator of alignment. Note that once in a while you might find that you have a project that clearly demonstrates strategic value, but doesn’t align to a specific objective – that can be a sign that you need to revisit your objectives

Making sure your projects actually happen:

• Every project must be realistically resourced – Time, money, staffing: there are never enough to go around, and they are probably the most important element of actually delivering on a project. This means you must have:
  • Accurately estimated the project needs – Make sure every project that you’re proposing has at least a high level time, cost, and staffing estimate
  • Budgeted for the project – Are there ongoing costs or one time costs or both?

• Every project must have an owner – Someone needs to coordinate the delivery of the project, they need to be responsible for getting it off the ground, and they need to have the authority to make all this work
• Stop operational projects getting into your strategic plan, and vice-versa – You want to keep your strategic plan focused. This means you need to avoid letting operational projects and activities creep in to the plan, as it will dilute your focus and impact the delivery of your strategic projects. Equally, you need to prevent projects that should be on the strategic plan, mapped to objectives, sliding into the operational plan and becoming invisible when you’re tracking your progress

Keeping things moving forward:

• Govern your projects strategically – Every objective will have its own mix of projects, and then there is the mix of projects across the whole strategic plan (in bigger plans you will even be thinking in terms of the mix within different divisions, departments, etc.). Don’t lose sight of the bigger picture – in the same way that the overall strategic management process emphasizes a governance process across the whole of strategy execution, the same applies to strategically managing your project mix
• Prioritize projects strategically across the whole organization – When the internal or external environment, available resources, strategic needs etc. change, you should to prioritize projects strategically across the whole plan, based on the objectives
• Allow the projects and objectives to inform each other – You must allow room for the realities of project implementation, and what you learn from doing the work, to be reflected in the higher level plan – even if it is just by keeping the objective timelines current and accurate. The more isolated your projects become from the rest of the plan, the less real your plan becomes