It’s hard – impossible, actually – for an organisation to reach its goals when investing in the wrong projects. Ray Wall, Client Engagement Director at PM-Partners shares five valuable tips for ensuring the initiatives in your portfolio are in tune with corporate strategy.

For any organisation, successful execution of strategy is essential to achieving growth and competitive advantage. But, as more decision-makers are acknowledging, this is only possible by aligning the initiatives within your portfolio/s to long-term organisational goals.

‘Alignment’ in this context means establishing a direct line from the corporate vision and strategy to the ideation and execution of initiatives that contribute to those objectives, and every layer in-between. This top-down process empowers organisations to deliver strategic outcomes by prioritising the right projects and assigning resources in the most efficient way. Particularly in today’s dynamic landscape, alignment can also help businesses manage disruption and adapt more easily as opportunities and challenges occur.

You can picture this as an ecosystem from the board down, creating sustainable, incremental performance improvements on a continual basis. The question is, what should you be doing as a PMO manager, portfolio manager or product manager to enable this system and streamline your organisation’s ability to achieve its goals?

5 fundamentals of strategic success

In order to support effective alignment across your delivery functions and processes, assess where you stand on the following:

1. Executive alignment

   Start at the top by checking you’re aligned to the executive vision and goals and you’re sufficiently invested in building relationships with the executive team, sponsors and other stakeholders. You also need to be on the same page regarding how performance will be measured and reported on. Establishing ongoing quarterly business or portfolio reviews will help to foster greater collaboration and communication and ensure you’re aware of any shifts in strategy and always working to the same ends. This forum also provides a regular opportunity to demonstrate value and maintain executive support.

2. Project prioritisation and selection

   The PMO plays an increasingly critical role in aligning projects to strategy, particularly in larger organisations and PMOs moving towards maturity. Investing in the wrong projects only serves to put a drain on resources and the organisation’s bottom line, so translating strategy into a standard set of criteria is essential to assess how individual projects stack up and, subsequently, to achieve balance in your portfolios. By focusing on areas such as strategic contribution, affordability, feasibility, risk and ROI you can accurately compare and select initiatives and determine prioritisation, as well as avoid potential conflicts, ensuring every project in the portfolio moves you closer to organisational goals.

3. Allocation of resources
   

   Efficient allocation of resources is an essential part of setting up your project/portfolio ecosystem to support strategic goals. Particularly with today’s talent shortage, organisations are often struggling to find suitably qualified practitioners – allocating scarce resources to the wrong projects is a recipe for poor performance and delivery failure. As initiatives are selected and prioritised, it’s vital that resources are channelled to the opportunities that add the most value to the organisation (as opposed to those that are politically better aligned to bargain for them) and that the right people are assigned to the right roles.

4. Communicating down to the teams
   

   It’s vital that team members understand the broader strategy, and the value their initiatives provide. Transparent, open communication is essential to managing others successfully and helps to build trust and accountability. When teams know what’s expected of them and how they can contribute to the big picture, they’ll typically work more purposefully. This helps to ensure that their day-to-day choices and actions are aligned with organisational goals and works to drive efficiency and, ultimately, project performance.

5. Monitoring performance

   Of course aligning projects and portfolios to long-term business goals is not a one-time affair. Regular performance reviews, in conjunction with consistent standards, measures and reporting processes – and any tools you need to support them, are critical in order to gauge strategic performance across the project lifecycle. Likewise, data needs to be fed up to the executive in a consistent manner. Take advantage of quarterly portfolio reviews to check initiatives still comply with organisational objectives and determine whether any shifts in strategy or expected benefits call for re-balancing your portfolio.

The projects that a business takes up and sees through to fruition will ultimately decide its future. Without strategic alignment and the big picture view this affords, your organisation is running blind, unable to make smart decisions or optimise resources. In contrast, by helping to ensure a clear line of sight between corporate strategy, the scope of your portfolio and the projects within it, including their strategic contribution and performance, you can create a more stable, productive work environment, increase strategic outputs, and pave the way to achieving long-term goals.

PM-Partners has decades of advisory experience helping organisations to invest in the right initiatives and safeguard those investments to achieve strategic outcomes. Contact our expert team or call 1300 70 13 14 today.