Connecting Project & Strategy Management through Integrated Governance

Effective strategy delivery is essential for organizations to thrive and fulfil their purpose. However, it’s widely acknowledged that many organizations struggle with this process. Within the project delivery community, we often find ourselves at the forefront of managing the changes required to bring strategies to life.

One of the key challenges we face is the lack of clear connections between an organization’s purpose, its strategy, and the practical steps needed for delivery. Time and again, issues related to clarity, communication, and delegation emerge as major obstacles to successful strategy execution.

However, organizations are not solely focused on change objectives.

Business units and product teams also have performance and value creation targets, often leading to conflicting priorities. Managing these competing demands—whether it’s about allocating funds, resources, or leadership attention—adds significant complexity to strategy delivery. This complexity brings additional challenges related to prioritization, progress tracking, performance control, agility, and integration.

While some of these challenges fall within the purview of PMO (Project Management Office) and P3 Governance professionals, many others do not, and often there is no clear ownership of these issues. For instance, during a recent APM PMO event, it became evident that no one could identify who in their organization was responsible for ensuring support for the connection between strategy and delivery.

It is clear that unless this connection is strengthened and governance across various domains becomes more systematic, organizations will continue to struggle with effective strategy delivery. This challenge is becoming even more daunting as organizations increasingly incorporate social and environmental goals into their purpose, further complicating governance and strategy execution.

To address these challenges, our organizations must improve in several areas: clarity and communication of strategic objectives, delegation and prioritization of goals, control over progress and performance, and integration across business functions. As we strive to become more purpose-driven, these improvements are essential.

The big question remains: Can PMOs and P3 Governance professionals step up to bridge the gap between strategy and delivery, not just in managing change but across all facets of strategy execution? Why not?

This involves providing support to each business area in:

Clarifying and communicating strategic objectives.
Cascading strategy into actionable sub-objectives with clear accountability.
Systematically prioritizing objectives to enable effective allocation of resources, leadership time, and funding.
Monitoring progress and performance.
Operating a review cycle to assess progress, performance, and future forecasts.
Supplying the data needed for quick decision-making, escalations, and referrals.

These are areas where PMOs and P3 Governance professionals already excel within the context of project and program management.

So, why not extend this expertise to support business-as-usual and value creation objectives, ensuring an integrated approach to strategy delivery?

This is the focus of our series, “Connecting Project and Strategy Management through Integrated Governance”

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

These will be hosted by the APM - details to follow.

Awareness and Desire - Understand link between Project Governance & Governance of Strategy

The first in our series of presentations which talks about recognising the opportunity to improve - can you see the issues above within your scenario? Can you see appetite to improve?

Format – set the scene, discuss our respective scenarios, offer a way forward

Outcome - from the questions we cover - you will have some ideas on how to engage your colleagues on the challenges of strategy delivery. Can you see pains which can be solved?

Calls to action - Join the BIG LinkedIn Group, Join BIG Forum (APM Area), Sign up as BIG Members – find out all you want about BIG online – sign up for STEP 2

This will be on the 11th October, 12.30pm.

More detail here

Learning from Wisdom (Knowledge) - Awareness of what BIG is and why its important

In the second in the series, we present the BIG Framework as a toolset which contains the core concepts, principles and components with which to define and build your integrated governance scenario

Format – Presentation, Q&A. The challenges of strategy delivery (strategy perspective), The role of Business Integrated Governance in strategy delivery (governance perspective), A Vision for the Capability needed for effective strategy delivery, The beneficiaries of leveraging BIG, Where to start with Building Blocks

Outcome - can you see what you'll need to build to improve the connection of strategy to delivery?

Calls to action - As STEP 1 – but sign up for STEP 3 as this will be a smaller round table group

This will be on the 14th November, 12.30pm.

More detail here

Making it happen (Ability) - Advice on what to do next.

In the final session in the series, we invite people who want to know how to get the change ball rolling and explain the BIG Journey – which can start with any sponsor, at any scale.

If you get the drivers for BIG, and understand what it is - how can we equip you to take the message to your organisation?

Format – Presentation - A Change Lifecycle, Structured Topic discussion – stakeholders, Nemawashi, Pain Perception, vision development, building a business case.

Outcome - plan our your current state assessment, discovery process, and business case build...

Calls to action - As STEP 1 – map your journey and share the process

This will be on the 12th December, 12.30pm