5 Ways to Build Business Acumen Across the Organization

Business acumen isn’t only an individual skill. Within your PMO, you are uniquely placed to help embed it at scale, across the organization. Even if your PMO is traditionally one that provides governance, templates and process guidance, you can do some capability building by supporting others to use their business acumen, and lift the whole organization at the same time.

Sounds ambitious? It is, but I believe you can do it!

The execution gap

You might have heard of the execution gap (or the strategy delivery gap, or any other similar phrase). It’s a phrase that represents the organizational distance between the lovely slide deck that expresses the strategy in a couple of infographics, and the projects or delivery activity that makes those goals a reality.

Project managers are trained in delivery. We are there to help the company turn things from ideas into tangible products, processes or deliverables. However, that means not many project managers ever get trained in commercial thinking, and the templates and reporting we use often reinforce this. Because by the time we get involved, management is interested in how the thing gets delivered, when it will be ready and how much it will cost.

Filling the execution gap

As project leaders in the PMO, there is the opportunity to make sure business cases are linked clearly to strategy—this is an easy …