Moving From Corporate Strategy To Project Strategy

Because much of the management writing on strategy focuses on corporate- and business-level practices, there is a dearth of writing explaining how organizations and project professionals implement corporate strategy through projects and programs and how they translate corporate strategy into project and program strategy. This article discusses strategy implementation and translation in relation to four case studies and a PMI-sponsored survey of PMI Europe members, a survey that reveals the processes, practices, and people issues involved in efforts to systematically move from strategy to projects and programs. In doing so, it describes the process of developing corporate strategy and explores--via the literature--the methods of implementing strategy through projects and programs. It then details the survey, describing the methodology used, explaining each case organization?s project and program practices, and analyzing the findings. It concludes by discussing the survey findings in relation to corporate and project strategy, business management and strategy, portfolio management and program management, and project management and project strategy.

A comprehensive guide to project management and its interaction with other management systems and strategies The Wiley Guides to the Management of Projects address critical, need-to-know information that will enable professionals to successfully manage projects in most businesses and help students learn the best practices of the industry. They contain not only well-known and widely used basic project management practices but also the newest and most cutting-edge concepts in the broader theory and practice of managing projects. This first book in the series, The Wiley Guide to Project, Program & Portfolio Management, is based on the "meta" level of management, which, simply stated, asserts that project management must be integrated throughout an organization in order to achieve its full potential to enhance the bottom line. This book will show you how to fully understand and exploit the strategic management of projects, portfolios, and program management and their linkage with context and strategy in other concepts and processes, such as quality management, concurrent engineering, just-in-time delivery, systems management and engineering, teams, and statistical quality control. Featuring contributions from experts all around the world, this invaluable resource book offers authoritative project management applications for industry, service businesses, and government agencies. Complete your understanding of project management with these other books in The Wiley Guides to the Management of Projects series: * The Wiley Guide to Project Control * The Wiley Guide to Project Organization & Project Management Competencies * The Wiley Guide to Project Technology, Supply Chain & Procurement Management

This comprehensive resource presents the fundamentals of project management and ties them to strategic business systems and procedures. This insightful guide demonstrates how project management fits into an organization and offers helpful advice on applying this knowledge on the job.

Now beyond its eleventh printing and translated into twelve languages, Michael Porter’s The Competitive Advantage of Nations has changed completely our conception of how prosperity is created and sustained in the modern global economy. Porter’s groundbreaking study of international competitiveness has shaped national policy in countries around the world. It has also transformed thinking and action in states, cities, companies, and even entire regions such as Central America. Based on research in ten leading trading nations, The Competitive Advantage of Nations offers the first theory of competitiveness based on the causes of the productivity with which companies compete. Porter shows how traditional comparative advantages such as natural resources and pools of labor have been superseded as sources of prosperity, and how broad macroeconomic accounts of competitiveness are insufficient. The book introduces Porter’s “diamond,” a whole new way to understand the competitive position of a nation (or other locations) in global competition that is now an integral part of international business thinking. Porter's concept of “clusters,” or groups of interconnected firms, suppliers, related industries, and institutions that arise in particular locations, has become a new way for companies and governments to think about economies, assess the competitive advantage of locations, and set public policy. Even before publication of the book, Porter’s theory had guided national reassessments in New Zealand and elsewhere. His ideas and personal involvement have shaped strategy in countries as diverse as the Netherlands, Portugal, Taiwan, Costa Rica, and India, and regions such as Massachusetts, California, and the Basque country. Hundreds of cluster initiatives have flourished throughout the world. In an era of intensifying global competition, this pathbreaking book on the new wealth of nations has become the standard by which all future work must be measured.

You think you have a winning strategy. But do you? Executives are bombarded with bestselling ideas and best practices for achieving competitive advantage, but many of these ideas and practices contradict each other. Should you aim to be big or fast? Should you create a blue ocean, be adaptive, play to win—or forget about a sustainable competitive advantage altogether? In a business environment that is changing faster and becoming more uncertain and complex almost by the day, it’s never been more important—or more difficult—to choose the right approach to strategy. In this book, The Boston Consulting Group’s Martin Reeves, Knut Haanæs, and Janmejaya Sinha offer a proven method to determine the strategy approach that is best for your company. They start by helping you assess your business environment—how unpredictable it is, how much power you have to change it, and how harsh it is—a critical component of getting strategy right. They show how existing strategy approaches sort into five categories—Be Big, Be Fast, Be First, Be the Orchestrator, or simply Be Viable—depending on the extent of predictability, malleability, and harshness. In-depth explanations of each of these approaches will provide critical insight to help you match your approach to strategy to your environment, determine when and how to execute each one, and avoid a potentially fatal mismatch. Addressing your most pressing strategic challenges, you’ll be able to answer questions such as: • What replaces planning when the annual cycle is obsolete? • When can we—and when should we—shape the game to our advantage? • How do we simultaneously implement different strategic approaches for different business units? • How do we manage the inherent contradictions in formulating and executing different strategies across multiple businesses and geographies? Until now, no book brings it all together and offers a practical tool for understanding which strategic approach to apply. Get started today.

Projects have become the de facto method of implementing business strategy and operations. As such, understanding how projects relate to business strategy and managing projects strategically is increasingly important to effective and efficient business management This book is designed as a short and concise treatise on how to go about doing that. The authors start by figuring out how the project relates to the rest of the business and environment and what separates it from other projects and functions. They go on to discuss how you can use principles of strategic management to better organize and manage the various projects you may be dealing with on a daily basis so that they are strategic in nature. In essence, this book details how to approach answering the important strategic questions in project management like—“Why is the project being implemented? How does the project relate to the major strategic goals of the organization? How do we accomplish the performance goals for the project so that they help achieve the major strategic goals of the organization?”

Organizations often focus on short-term results, such as immediate financial goals. However, projects are expected to achieve results that link back to an organization's overall business strategy. This apparent discrepancy led researchers to ask: What does it mean to link project management strategy to business strategy?In Linking Project Management to Business Strategy, researchers were guided by the hypothesis: If projects are successful in aligning their efforts with the business strategy, they will better contribute to the long-term goals of the organization.Linking Project Management to Business Strategy is divided into three sections:Conceptual Foundation provides definitions for terms in found in later sections and creates the conceptual and theoretical framework for examining the issue of strategic alignmentEmpirical Verification examines the previously developed frameworks in order to test the original hypothesisBeyond the Framework analyzes 18 successful projects and identifies the 11 common factors found in all of them

Explains how companies must pinpoint business strategies to a few critically important choices, identifying common blunders while outlining simple exercises and questions that can guide day-to-day and long-term decisions.