Strategic Alignment for Small Businesses

Chi-Pong Wong is a seasoned supply chain strategist, program manager, service center manager and relations manager. He has published on leading online magazines and other popular journals. He earned a MA in Economics at SUNY Stony Brook and a MS in Computer Science at Duke University. He can be reached at Linkedin and [email protected].

  Strategy  

While well-governed and effectively established corporations are less prone to misalign their business goals and their project objectives, small businesses are more vulnerable to misalignment. Employees in small companies are commonly overworked, overstressed and wear multiple hats--all contributing to some infertile soil to implement and follow through with sound project management practices.

It should thus not be surprising to see their products misaligned with market demands. In fact, an astounding 42% of startups failed because of missing on market needs (the No. 1 startup failure) as reported last year by the TNW news. Hence, making sure that their projects deliver what the market dictates is particularly crucial for small companies because their very own survival just might depend on it.

EPMO and PMO: Not for Tiny Businesses
Global corporations can embrace Enterprise Project Management Offices to govern alignment of business goals and project deliverables, and medium-sized firms might be able to as well. But EPMOs are not for pint-sized companies.

A company will have to be big enough to support an organization dedicated to project management, and this company has to be established enough to have built a mature project management culture to allow this mechanism to flourish. These conditions are beyond small establishments, which will have to rely on their …

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