Project Strategy

Too often, project managers and their stakeholders lack the visibility into how their project's fit into the business' grand vision. Think how wonderfully your business would run if everyone from the C-suite to the feet on the street understood how to maintain focus executing business strategies.

Project Alignment for Management Teams helps your project managers and their stakeholders:

1. Understand what is valuable for your organization.
2. Reduce miscommunication.
3. Focus their energies and your resources.

Due to its abundant use in organizations, this workshop uses balanced scorecard as the tools to define and align strategic goals. However, balanced scorecard only works if its information is disseminated throughout the organization. This workshop helps executives, PMO managers, executive sponsors, project managers, and their project teams understand why and how a strategy is defined, the use of activity and strategy maps, and how they apply to the organization's projects.

In May 2007, the Massachusetts Division of Unemployment Assistance (DUA) signed a contract with Bearing Point, Inc. to modernize the State’s unemployment processing system. The project was called the DUA Quality Unemployment System Transformation (QUEST) Project. Bearing Point filed for bankruptcy in February 2009 and Deloitte announced they would buy Bearing Point for $350MM in March of the same year.

Executives define vision, strategy, and goals to advance the business. Projects enable companies to meet those goals. Between strategy and projects, there is a lot of work to be done—work that lays the foundation for project and operational success. Through experience and research, six common gaps exist in organizations that inhibit project success—an absence of common understanding, disengaged executive sponsors, misalignment with goals, poor change management, ineffective governance, and lackluster leadership.

Leaders define the vision. A business turns vision into value. It still takes a team of executives, managers, project managers, and individual contributors to drive the projects that build the capabilities to transform businesses. Ergo, projects are the enablers for turning vision into value.

The Vision to Value keynote is geared toward helping executives, finance leaders, technology leaders, and project managers understand what is required to enable the organization to share and stay focused on the company's goals, hence, reducing waste, increasing productivity, and decreasing waste.

In order to comply with the Affordable Care Act, the State of Oregon made the decision to build its own Health Insurance Exchange (ORHIX). An online portal to allow applicants was supposed to go live October 1, 2013. As of March 30, 2014 the site was not functional and all ORHIX applications must be processed from paper applications.

People often fail to realize how many actions in work and our personal lives rely on negotiation. It could be negotiating a raise, setting up conditions about using a resource, determining a task's scope, or adjusting a delivery date. We do some form of negotiation daily. Even though we learn to negotiate at just about the same time that we learn to communicate, we rarely understand the science and art behind it. By establishing a process around negotiation, we maximize our chances for success. A process ensures that we understand the wants and needs of the person on the other side of the table. 

The fate of a project is often sealed long before the first person is assigned or charters, contracts, or SOWs are written.  Experience with auditing dozens of projects and doing root cause analysis projects has shown that corporate decisions, not project decisions, have a very larger effect. This presentation, designed for executives, PMO managers, and senior project managers, focuses on a number of techniques learned while recovering projects that greatly improve the chances for success. It introduces the concept of guidance teams that get involved with the project at the customer inception stage and follows the project and team through to its completion.

Recently, I surveyed a dozen or so students at three Portland area universities. Three-quarters of them replied. An adequate response, since the questions were open-ended, requiring a written answer. The students were all business majors and a majority of them in Management Information Systems (MIS). Although anonymous, I knew the group of northwest students well enough that the optimistic, upbeat tone of the responses were no wonder. The surprise was what was missing.

Gears for Success

A vision is just a dream without a strategy to implement it. The act of strategic planning helps define what you plan to do, your target customers, and where you are going. It takes into account the opportunities, threats, bumps, and risks that may be encountered in your journey to turn your vision into value. The result is a set of clearly defined strategic goals, an action plan to achieve them, and a risk mitigation plan. For start-ups, a highly-adaptive plan may cover one to two years, while for mature companies it may span three to five years is more appropriate. This five- to ten-page document, however, must be clear, concise, and easy to understand by your stakeholders and shareholders.

Whether an investor, a member of your senior staff, or an employee, everyone should be able to identify how the strategy relates to him or her. Aligning and prioritizing your initiatives, projects, finances, people, and other assets to the strategic goals is a critical next step in ensuring that your vision can be realized in the quickest and most profitable manner. Only through rigorous planning, alignment, and adoption will you achieve your goals.

eCameron the breadth and depth of experience with companies of all sizes, from start-ups to billion dollar corporations, and a wide range of industries to assist with building your strategy and maintaining alignment.

Value: Rather than scope, schedule, and budget, value is the lynch-pin of project success. Although the former three constraints are key factors in project success, there is no guarantee that meeting these constraints will result in a positive outcome. Instead constantly tracking the value of the project and making adjustments to the triple constraints to attain sufficient value is critical. Arguably this is the project managers most critical deliverable in the project. It requires significant insight into the project’s customer and a thorough understanding of their needs versus their wants. Project managers have to be leaders (leading subordinates, leaders, and customers), be able to assign priorities based on a critical, objective view.