Project leadership can drive long-term impact in a company’s level of competitiveness along two axes.
We discussed the first 2 weeks ago : as a change agent for corporate evolution and transformation. The second axis deals with ensuring workforce competitiveness. This includes building core competencies in talent management and skills and capacity forecasting. Last week, we discussed Institutional Learning.This week, we will discuss how PMOs can drive Strategy Execution.
Business Strategy Execution
Most PMOs are adept at bottom-up strategy alignment.
Strategy alignment answers the question “with what strategies does this project align?” It assumes the existence of a project idea or in-flight project. If practiced properly, it is a useful approach in the project selection or on-going justification process and as a practice for providing a bottom-up line of sight between project activity and corporate strategic priorities. While necessary, bottom-up strategy alignment does nothing to proactively drive long-term competitive advantage because alignment is reactionary to strategy. To proactively drive strategy, you need a process for strategy execution.
Strategy execution answers the question “what projects should we execute to implement this strategy?” This top-down, outside-in approach to driving project ideation and activity is critical to making long-term strategies like business transformation a reality. To be even more sophisticated, PPM leadership can support long-term strategy via strategy formulation.
Strategy formulation is a prescriptive decision-support function that answers the question: “what strategies should be pursued given what is known about things like longer-term resource capacity, execution and portfolio risks, and program inter-dependencies, etc (i.e. leveraging the institutional knowledge base discussed above)?” Thus, business-driven PMOs have the potential to gain a seat at the business strategy development table, attain trusted advisor status, and influence long-term corporate strategy and competitiveness with its unique knowledge of an initiative’s chances to succeed from execution standpoint and the various risks that need to be addressed.
Interested in this subject ? Read our latest eBook : 7 Ongoing challenges for the PMO (and how to overcome them). Or browse our Resource Center.
Valerie Zeller
Valerie is Sciforma Chief Marketing Officer. Main interests: digital transformation, change management, strategy execution. Send your thoughts @valeriezeller