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 pr