Develop A Project Strategy In 8 Steps

Your organization is probably doing some form of project management, but if you’re reading this article, you’ve realized it needs more structure, especially for efforts tied to your strategic plan.

Project strategy means aligning projects to your business strategy, then tracking and managing them. It is key to your success. Companies who do project strategy well are better positioned to reach their goals because they can distill high-level strategic visions into tangible actions.

Combining business strategy and project management isn’t always intuitive. Follow the steps below and you’ll have a solid approach you can apply across your organization.

Rethink (& Improve) Your Project Strategy In 8 Steps

Step 1: Align terminology across your organization.

Some teams say “projects,” others prefer “initiatives.” Components of a project might be “milestones,” “phases,” or “tasks.” Employees may not share the same definition of a goal. Most organizations have a bunch of synonyms floating around. Each department or team uses different words for the same thing. The first step in improving your project strategy is to align your terminology. Create a glossary of common terms and share it across your organization so everyone speaks the same language.

Step 2: Specify who will be involved.

After you iron out the language, decide who should be involved in your efforts to align projects with the business strategy. Some of that decision will depend on where you personally sit in the organization. If you’re part of the project management office, involve folks from the strategy department. If you’re in the strategy department, involve the project management office.

This step is more than naming names. It also means going to departments to find out who is managing their projects currently and how they’re managing them. You must understand the process each department or team uses before you go to the next steps and attempt to standardize and unify all strategic project management in your organization.

You’ll also need to get buy-in from decision makers, and that means involving your organization’s leaders, such as department heads and senior executives. If these leaders become your project sponsors or executive advocates, your approach gains credibility. You need support at the top, especially if you’re launching an organization-wide initiative to change how strategy and project management work together.

Step 3: Determine the extent of your project strategy.

Decide how deep your “strategy-first” project management approach should go. It will certainly cover organization-wide projects. You also need to decide whether it applies at the department level, and at the team level.

Depending on your organization’s size, your personal capacity to manage the efforts, and the resources available for tracking and reporting, you’ll have to define boundaries around the scope of your strategic project management. For example, if you’re the only person in the organization managing project strategy and you’re using Excel, it will be extremely hard to track and report on the hundreds of initiatives likely underway at the organization, department, and team levels. It might be wiser to limit your efforts to the highest levels.

Some organizations flip steps two and three. Depending on your internal structure and capacity, it may be easier to first determine how widely you’re going to apply a strategic project management approach and then define who will be involved. (Steps two and three could also be tackled in conjunction with one another.)

Step 4: Set rules around what types of projects are considered strategic.

At this point, you need to draw a line between strategic versus operational projects. Focus on managing strategic projects, because they advance your big-picture organizational goals. Operational projects “keep the lights on” and are more tactical.

Defining the types of projects keeps your focus on initiatives that affect your strategic plan and therefore should be reported to the leadership team. In this step, you set rules about which types of projects fall under your strategic management purview.

In general, operational projects target day-to-day processes and don’t need to be reviewed in detail by senior leaders. There may be some larger operational projects that you’ll wrap into your project strategy, but what you manage and report to stakeholders will be more limited. For example, any operational projects in your reports may only include high-level information like RAG status indicators, while true strategic projects will include more details and data.

Step 5: Decide which projects to manage.

Once you’ve defined what types of projects you should be tracking, look across your organization to choose which ones you actually want to manage. To make your decision, you’ll have to balance the total number of projects that qualify as strategic (based on the rules you set in step four) and the resources you have (time, staff, budget, technology tools, etc.) to support your project strategy efforts. Some projects drive business value but not as much as others, and with limited resources, they may be cut.

Beware that this can be an emotional process. Team members can feel a high degree of ownership for certain projects and might take it personally when they are sidelined by the strategic project management office.

Step 6: Prioritize the projects you’ve decided to manage.

Once you’ve chosen which projects to manage, it’s time to rank them in order of importance. In this deliberate process, you and the stakeholders you named in step two prioritize projects by how much they move the organization’s strategic plan forward. Step six is both a budgeting and a resource planning exercise. Higher priority projects will receive more funding (if necessary) and will likely launch sooner.

Smaller organizations may choose to combine steps five and six, but a methodical project strategy approach keeps them as two separate efforts.

Determining what’s important may differ between two people on the same leadership team. ClearPoint has helped organizations develop a rubric for scoring initiatives and ordering them by importance. Parts of this rubric may be based on cost, expected benefit, complexity, and interdependency. Of course, you can create complex voting systems, but assuming these items are weighed evenly and everyone on the leadership team gets a vote, you can quickly come up with some objective scores for your projects. This will give you a good starting point for ranking them.

Step 7: Implement a project tracking system.

To manage strategic projects, you need a solid tracking system. It should let you and other stakeholders see what’s going on with strategic projects in real time, whenever needed. Your project tracking software should offer:

• Tracking and reporting formats that are standardized, yet flexible
• Built-in processes to request and gather input from team members
• Data collection tools (such as APIs) that automatically pull information from other project management systems in the organization
• Quantitative and qualitative data tracking features

Project owners will have almost daily updates, and your system should capture them as they happen. Important project developments happen often and need closer tracking than other data, such as monthly performance measures.

Step 8: Start tracking and reporting.

You’ve built a solid project strategy approach and have a software system in place. Now, you need to get going with tracking and reporting on your strategic projects.

Expect that your methods will change over time. Your leaders might want to see different types of information, and you’ll learn better ways to present data to different audiences. That is normal. Be prepared to adapt. That goes for your strategic project management solution as well. It should be flexible enough to evolve with your needs, while holding all the strategic data you gather across your organization in one place.

If you’ve completed steps 1-6 and are hunting for a software solution, check out ClearPoint’s tools for strategic project management. Our system can help you keep every moving part organized and aligned with the strategic plan you worked so hard to define.