Developing a Project Strategy

Eliminating the bad habit of launching every project desired

This is the year one of my clients, a senior project director within his organization, decided the company will have a strategy for the projects they complete! A review of projects completed over the last 5 years indicated to them that, while many projects have been successful, many still have not been successful. In further review of the projects that have not been successful, the client noted the following:

• A number of them never should have been launched as they did not have the resources, budget nor interest to support them and enable for success
• Others appeared to be planned poorly and failure was attributed to that poor planning
• One was a pet project that had significant investment money from leadership, but no clear understanding of what it was supposed to accomplish

During a meeting, we discussed the need to prioritize projects. Especially since in the upcoming year the organization had a number of strategic objectives to expand the business into new geographic areas and to launch a number of new products. Previously, projects selected were not “officially” mapped to organizational strategic objectives. In the past, some projects were able to be linked back to strategic long-term goals certainly, others could be “squeezed” to fit, and yet others had no link at all to a strategic long-term goal.

The client decided that in order to reduce the number of projects being done to a manageable amount but to ensure that those projects that were selected enabled for achieving goals, the following should be reviewed for each project before it was launched and resources assigned to it:

• The project must help to achieve one of the organization’s strategic goals, either in full or in part (in part means it must at least move the goal forward.)
• Expected project benefits must outweigh the project costs (positive ROI.)
• The budget exists to complete the project.
• The proposed scope is achievable.
• Resources are available to complete the project (with the majority of resources coming from internally.)
• Technology is available to launch and complete the project.

Projects that meet the requirements above will be further prioritized as follows:

It was decided among the leadership team that for 2014 this process for selecting and prioritizing projects will be used, with the expectation that it will need to be fine-tuned. However, it is believed this is a good starting point to ensure the right projects are selected. Certainly considering that the organization has not had a way to select and prioritize projects previously, this was a step in the right direction.