Do You Aim for Value...or Strategic Value?

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Strategy  

All organizations need to deliver value through their projects. It doesn’t matter if we are talking about a private sector company, a public institution, or a not for profit. Value matters.

How that value is defined and measured differs across those different organizational types. But fundamentally, the goal is to maximize the benefits delivered for the money, effort and time invested. Companies want maximized profits, sales volumes, and market shares. Government agencies want to provide as much service to citizens as possible. Charities want to do as much good as they can.

While the details are always complex, and trade-offs inevitably occur, the fundamentals are fairly straightforward—spend the least. Or perhaps, do as much work as possible for the funds available, and gain as much value as you can. It’s what drives success.

In recent years, project managers have increasingly become a part of that process. They are now asked to focus not just on the triple constraint, but also to ensure that the project is able to achieve its benefit targets. That’s not just the amount of benefit, but also the type—gaining market share isn’t success if the target was profitability and that goal was missed, for example.

Undoubtedly, this has helped drive overall return on project investments, and it has led to project managers and teams being …

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