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Where are we going and How are we going to get there?

Urban Aderklint

Without strategy, you fail. Without strategy in a rapidly changing industry, you fail rapidly.

Louis J. Gerstner, CEO of IBM, 1999

All organisations have a strategy, explicit or implied, that upper management uses to guide decision-making. Most project managers, however, are too involved in day-to -day problem solving and managing their projects to pay much attention to the strategy. Even when they do have time to look up and view the long-term horizon, strategy don´t seems so important to them.
After all, upper management who supposed to be the champions of strategy frequently do not seem to take it that serious. How often does it happened that the PM have to answer for decision made or action taken that violated a strategic principle or interfered with the strategic direction of the company.

Enviroments are no longer placid and stable. They have become turbulent.
Change is happening more often, at a faster pace and in less predictable ways.
Due to this management behaviour and focus must change rapidly, these changes need strategic direction. As a result, strategic planning has become a much more active process of setting the direction for the company, formulating prioriteies, guiding managerial action and evaluating the result so that the business can stay aligned with the enviroment. Under conditions of environmental turbulence it becomes very important for all managers to understand and internalise strategy because decisions must often be made where the action is happening.
The managers implementing the corporate strategy must be able to react to change as they go along. Project Managers are especially subject to this requirement because of the important role of projects in strategy implementation.

More and more the project portfolio is the driving engine for strategy implementation.
And the project managers are the ones who must manage the projects that makes up the portfolio that drives the strategy, a top-down bottom-up approach.

Since the upper management now taking planning more seriously, is there any reason to doubt that project manager will be more and more hold accountable for keeping their project aligned with the strategy? If this is the case, project managers must understand what the strategy is and how their project fit in to the picture.
"The road to capital productivity begins with a tight link between capital spending and business strategy.

Project Managers need to understand strategy and how to align their projects with it for the following resons as well.

Be prepared for evaluation, Very soon companies will be evaluating project managers on implementing the strategy. If you bring your project in on time, under budget and exactly to specifications, but fails to support the strategy of the company it will no be considered a success and you will not be considered as a successful and skilled project manager.

Make more appropriate decisions, Understanding your company´s strategy will help you make decisions during the project. If your company´s strategy is best implemented by being first t market with the project outcome, you will know to focus more on maintaining the schedule and cycle time, or I your company focus more on efficient operations and low costs, you will know to focus on budget and efficiency in your project.

Foster team building, The knowledge of company strategy will help the project manager to clearify the project goals for the team. Having a common goal is the first step in developing a group of individuals into a well functioning team. Studies of project failure often cite the lack of a clear goal as a factor in the failure. Aligning a project with the company strategy also makes the goals of the project more relevant to every department in an organisation and it will help developing a cross-functional team.

Resist project cancellation (for the right reson), Aligning your project with corporate strategy will help you to protect your project from being cancelled, unless the organisation´s strategy is changed.

Accept or recommend project cancellation. Conversely, your project may have moved down the list of strategic priorities. Or if you realize that your project not any longer cannot meet current strategic goals, it´s your responsibility to recommend that it should be cancelled.

Stay on track. Alignment with strategy will help you and your team resist all kinds of organisational pressure to serve short term interest with the project instead of staying the course and serving the long-term interest of the company.