Strategy Should Be Unlimited
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. It’s a word that project managers hear a lot these days. Some PMs would argue that they hear it too much (and they may be right). But what exactly is strategy? That might sound like a question with an obvious answer, but if you spend a few minutes thinking about it, you start to realize that it’s a lot more complex than it seems at first.
In a project context, it tends to be associated with strategic planning—the determination of the key initiatives that the organization wants to pursue. That leads to it being linked to the overall portfolio of projects, as well as the goals and objectives that are set to determine whether that portfolio has succeeded or not once it is delivered.
But there’s more to it than that.
What is strategy?
The word itself is derived from Greek and is very specifically referencing military actions, and of course strategy is still used in a military sense. Merriam Webster picks up on that with one of its definitions: “the science and art of employing the political, economic, psychological, and military forces of a nation or group of nations to provide the maximum support of adopted policies in peace or war.” One of the other definitions may be more familiar to us: “a careful plan or method for achieving a particular goal usually over a long period of time.”
We can argue over the …
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