4 Key Project Management Roles & Responsibilities To Align With Strategy

For strategic projects, who is involved matters as much as what is involved. Even a project that’s perfectly organized and aligned with your strategy won’t be successful unless you have the right people on board. The hard part is knowing who to loop in and who to leave out. Based on the hundreds of organizations we’ve worked with, here are the four most important strategic project management roles and responsibilities:

(Executive) Project Sponsor

The sponsor is someone who ideally sits at the executive level and is the project’s champion or advocate. This person wants to see high-level progress reports and receives updates on the team’s efforts to stay on track (or plans to course correct if delays or changes have impacted the project). The sponsor knows the number and type of resources needed for a project and could facilitate the addition of more resources if required.

As part of their project management responsibilities, the sponsor shares progress reports with the rest of the leadership team and ensures that the project is (and continues to be) aligned with the organization’s overall mission, vision, and goals. The sponsor can advocate for the project during a strategic discussion or communicate project changes as a result of decisions or budget adjustments at the leadership level.

Make the sponsor role explicit, so no executive has to guess which projects are theirs. Origin Bank did this with its Corporate Big 5 goals. A high-level summary report linked each goal to its strategic blueprints, and Origin Bank set up “Executive Big 5s” for each executive so they knew which strategic blueprint projects they were responsible for. The bank said the approach had built a sense of accountability and showed how each executive’s projects line up with corporate strategy.

Strategy Manager

The strategy manager is responsible for aligning projects with the organization’s strategic plan. This person acts as a “checks and balances,” confirming that each project has a clear purpose and reason for existing. In other words, it confirms the work is worth the effort. The strategy manager prioritizes projects based on the organization’s goals and available resources. This person’s project management responsibilities also include preparing a high-level report for the leadership team. The report should give enough context about project details to keep the project funded and supported.

The strategy manager acts like a portfolio manager for strategic projects. This person may sit in the project management office (PMO) of a larger organization or strategy office and be responsible for strategic projects, among other strategic activities, like measures and goals.

Like any project portfolio manager, the strategy manager stays involved after the work is handed off, overseeing progress and the overall performance of the portfolio. At Origin Bank, corporate project management was centralized, so there was a party responsible for seeing each project through. Regina McNeill, Senior Vice President of Market Analytics and Strategic Planning, met with these project managers monthly to make sure any needed changes to the strategic plan were made and communicated.

The strategy manager also decides what becomes a project in the first place. Cobb EMC ran an “Idea Machine” that let any staff member offer suggestions to leadership anonymously. Each idea was entered in an Idea Machine scorecard, and the executive team reviewed the ideas in its meeting. An approved idea became a linked project, and a project manager became accountable for its implementation. When an idea was not approved, management told the submitter, so the effort was still acknowledged.

Project Manager

The project manager (PM) is the circus ringmaster, coordinating efforts and cueing resources with clockwork precision. More than anyone else, this role straddles the line between strategy and execution. This person creates the overall project plan and assigns roles to team members. They are also in charge of creating the RACI matrix, or other framework that clearly defines responsibilities and prioritizes actions.

The matrix can follow whatever vocabulary your organization already uses. The Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma adopted an Extended Rasci Matrix for its strategic plan, and custom fields let the tribe use the nomenclature it knows and understands well. Its main scorecard holds project management for over 200 strategic objectives across hundreds of businesses, programs and services.

The PM decides how the project will be tracked and measured. That includes defining KPIs to track ROI, which is necessary to obtain resources from the leadership team. Managing the budget also falls on the PM’s plate, and this role reports on whether the project is financially on track or overspending. Generally, the PM manages risks and escalates issues to the executive leadership team as needed. This person usually determines the RAG status of a project as well.

Agree on what each color means before the first report goes out. Our guide to setting RAG statuses explains that red is an alert, amber signals caution and green means you’re in the clear. Some organizations add colors, like blue for completed projects or gray for insufficient information. Set clear, objective criteria to reduce subjectivity, and treat the status as a starting point for deeper conversation, not a replacement for it.

Project Team

The project team is made up of your subject matter experts, the people doing the actual work. Team members can come from any department in the organization, and a properly staffed team can be assembled in a variety of ways. From IT managers and senior developers to operations coordinators and HR staff, the team’s composition depends on the type of project and its resource needs.

Each team member owns and executes different aspects (milestones or tasks) of the project. They also collect data and provide context from a “boots on the ground” perspective. The team’s combined efforts move the project forward, and their activities are reported on and rolled up to the project manager. The executive team likely won’t be updated on most of the project team’s work unless it directly ties to the strategic plan.

Give the team an easy way to report what it is doing. At Cobb EMC, tracking used to live almost entirely in Excel files, with multiple versions of reports as different people updated different files. Once projects moved into one system, Johnny Rainer, Contract Administrator, said: “The ability to export and communicate reports to division heads was immensely important to the updaters and administrators as it allowed them to more effectively provide a succinct snapshot of what they were doing to achieve their goals and what their progress looked like.”

Summary

Your projects need all these roles. A complete team keeps the project running efficiently on the ground and strategic at the highest level of the organization. To learn more about project management roles and responsibilities, check out our resource library.