Connecting Project & Strategy Management through Integrated Governance - Learning from Wisdom (Knowledge)

Article prepared by:

David Dunning – lead author, Business Integrated Governance

On the 14th November, 12.30pm., the APM Governance Interest Network his hosting the second in a series of events aimed at emboldening PMO / P3 Governance Professionals to step into the gap between strategy and delivery.

Change projects and programmes come in all shapes and sizes. From operational projects to support business operation, to the strategic that programme that supports objectives in a change portfolio.

There is a widely held misconception that strategy delivery is only about change, and that all we need is a strategic change programme and we are covered. Wrong on both counts. As owner of an SME (not Deepteam) - our business strategy relies on:

Business Performance. Our strategic goals CANNOT be met unless the business operates and generates results.
Product Development. If our product portfolio isn't / doesn't become what customers want - we will not achieve our goals
Strategic Change - while we need operational change to maintain BAU performance - there are cross functional strategic initiatives to develop reputation, operational excellence and culture goals.

So - strategy delivery is much more than just change. We need to develop and exploit our products (physical and service to generate value), and our business operation (grow and perform). The strategic objectives related to value and business performance typically are the focus for leadership time, resources and funds.

Therefore - our change portfolio does clearly not therefore contain all the strategic objectives we need to achieve to meet our business purpose, AND it has to compete for leadership time, resources and funds with value creation and operational entities. There are also dependencies between portfolio items and elements of value creation and / or BAU / Product development.

At the APM PMO conference in June '24 we asked the question - do attendees knows who supports the connection of strategy to delivery across the organisation. Across c. 100 PMO professionals - no one knew. Please see the event report here.

In our first event in this series, we have presented evidence that strategy to delivery does not work well for many organisations. We have offered a framework for the reasons why not, and we will have engaged a significant group of P3 professionals in the pains of strategy delivery - and we will understand the drivers to make strategy delivery improvements. Our previous sessions have delivered this kind of conclusion.

However, for a P3O to step into the broader realm of supporting strategy delivery, not just project delivery, there needs to be infrastructure to support that. In the same way the P3O will have built capability to operate P3 (governance framework, reporting, process / roles, people competence, tools...) the same job needs doing to get hold of strategy delivery.

The second session in our series with the APM Governance Interest Network therefore presents the building blocks for strategy delivery that an aspiring and empowered P3O will need to build in order to bring the order of a well-oiled change portfolio to the overall business portfolio.

This in in preparation for the final session in the series where we will workshop how exactly to go about this.

Who should attend?

- PMO Leaders who are struggling to support strategic projects and programmes

- PMO Directors to cannot see how strategy is driving change or how projects are enabling strategy

- Governance Professionals who want to see effective decision making, application of policy and process to strategy delivery

- Operations and finance directors who want to see funds / resources deployed in line with strategic priorities

- Strategic leadership who want to see effective strategy delivery

- More stakeholder profiles here

What next?

As mentioned, this event is the first in a series of 3. The event series is introduced here.

To be notified of the Blogs and online discussions around the event, and be notified when the booking page is live - please register for Alerts below:

Alerts about more of these

How we engage Read more about BIG