Aligning projects with business objectives is essential for any organization to achieve higher performance. To ensure that projects are in line with the company's vision and mission, it is important to identify the right project management framework, understand the role of a leader, establish a communication protocol, create an aligned action plan, and assess the project's viability. Additionally, it is important to create a culture that supports projects and recognize the two huge elephant traps. If you are in the Office of Business Transformation, you have an opportunity to push forward strategic alignment as a comprehensive exercise. Identifying your company's vision and mission is the first step in aligning business strategy with your project management procedure.
This will help you choose the right project management framework and understand your role as a leader. It is also important to establish a communication protocol prior to project work. This will allow projects to stay aligned with the evolving strategy and for project objectives to be defined accordingly. An aligned action plan involves recognizing the limits of what can be achieved and configuring backlog around the most critical outcomes. Companies around the world are losing billions of dollars in useless project spending, and this waste is carefully hidden from management and investors.
The project manager and the company can only assess whether the project is still viable and aligned with the current business strategy if ambitious results are achieved. If you “achieve” strategic alignment, it can become a noun, something that gives your organization an advantage, and it's this cultural dimension that makes it practically impossible to copy it. You can't line everything up right away, but every day you spend too busy to figure it out is time the competition may be using to advance their lineup. A regular portfolio of high-impact projects will boost the PMO as the company feels the dopamine effect that produces progress. There needs to be clarity about how these objectives extend throughout the organization, both in terms of the responsibility of the divisions and the portfolio structure for projects involving several teams. Its manufacturing processes have been admired by business schools for decades (I remember studying them “in the past”), but its market capitalization is still the market leader.
In the project-driven company, the business strategy establishes the strategic objectives, which then generate the programs, projects, and activities. Higher business performance depends on good project management, as well as on creating a culture that supports projects. It is essential that this alignment be carried out with a lucid approach that recognizes a pair of huge elephant traps. If you're reading this in the Office of Business Transformation, you have an opportunity to push forward strategic alignment as a comprehensive exercise. Over the past few decades, much academic research has been done on the effects of strategic alignment on organizational performance.
Either way, the message is clear: take control of the value your portfolio offers by quantifying the strategic value of projects.
