The Strategic Initiative: Getting off on the Right Foot

Paul has run a plethora of projects in multiple industries throughout his 20-year career, ranging from process improvement to agile to most recently cyber-security. Paul is also a reputable speaker, drawing practical and humorous conclusions from the "trenches" of his employers. Paul's dedication as a PM practitioner started decades ago, when he became one of the first 10,000 people to earn the PMP.

  Risk Management   Scope Management   Strategy  

There’s no shortage of ideas in corporate America today. You can poll any manager in any company on what is needed to take the organization forward. When asked, any manager will recite a litany of gaps between the current state and what should be.

When this is done at the board level or executive level, these gaps are often formalized into the organization’s strategy, which is then summarized and communicated down to the rest of the organization. Subsequently, everyone under the executive level needs to understand and internalize the strategy and set departmental goals that will define their contribution to achieving that strategy.

Sound simplistic and familiar? For sure, because that’s the easy part! Setting the strategy and departmental goals seldom stops the litany and frustrations, because it’s been proven time and time again that implementation of the strategy is the real challenge, not strategy formation.

The difficulty of implementing strategy results in a huge opportunity for project and program managers. After all, to whom does an organization turn when something needs to get done? That exuberant enthusiasm of executives returning from a strategy workshop is quickly forgotten once the inertia of the day-to-day grind mandates their attention.

After initiatives and programs are proposed from the strategy, it is not sufficient to assign…

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