One of the repeated questions from people attending my training on project management is that their roles within their companies have reinforced that project management is all about delivering an agreed scope of work on budget and on scope. But project management has been focused for several years on delivering a unique product, service, or result. While timely delivery of agreed scope within budget is the focus of the minimally marketable feature (phase/minor release) aspects, the focus of the project manager is strategic on the product with a long-term orientation using the notions of rolling wave planning and progressive (increment) elaboration (iteration). This is the reason why even the Project Management Institute has professional developmental units based on the PDU talent triangle incorporating the strategic and leadership components.
So, how different is strategic project management? In simple words, I view that strategic project management is all about making project management indispensable for business. This involves a laser focus on the following requiring a project manager to look holistically at the bigger picture while executing the assigned projects. As you can see, only #4 in the list below is about traditional project management focus - Focusing on outputs and capabilities!
- Developing initiatives to deliver benefits
- Supporting projects with programs and portfolios
- Aligning value with the strategic business case
- Designing and implementing projects
- Measuring results against the benefit realization
The initiative development to deliver benefits requires one to think big wearing multiple hats to analyze business drivers to maximize solution benefits. The strategic project manager must be able to develop clear strategies along with a roadmap at a level that can be audited for delivery! When producing capabilities from the projects, the strategic project manager may also have to think of the talent (skills and competencies) required for future valuable work.
The program and portfolio support requires the strategic project manager not only to execute their projects but be a voice for program and portfolio to develop and execute program roadmap and select the right projects and program inside the portfolio. This project selection may require support to balance resources within the portfolio using risks as a pivotal catalyst to manage overall portfolio performance or program benefit delivery.
Since value is a measure of the degree of benefit realized by the users, the strategic project manager will be skilled at facilitating larger meetings directly or remotely addressing many types of stakeholders, understand and support creation of the strategic business case for capital budgeting as well as financial controls and continue to identify, analyze, evaluate and treat positive and negative risks through their projects and the other projects, subprograms, and program related activities.
The strategic project manager's role in designing and implementing projects is the basic competency. In this capacity, the strategic project manager focuses on setting major release (phase) and minor release (iteration) goals, aligning these goals to the strategic goals and roadmap, linking deliverables to outcomes and benefits, and monitoring the progress of the project through a combination of lagging and leading indicators as appropriate.
Finally, in the benefit realization, the strategic project manager supports contribution of project performance to objectives and key results (which are beyond KPIs), evaluates benefit realization through ROI indicators and recommends what new initiatives need to be brought or what existing initiatives should be terminated, parked, or modified!
As we look at people talking about project manager role is missing in Agile or Scrum frameworks or that we need to move from 'project' mindset to 'product' mindset, we are looking for strategic project managers that have long-term orientation for value delivery. These claims do not mean project management skills are not required but the project manager competencies need to be upgraded.
What do you think? Thoughts? Please share.
