Strategic Project Management: New Skills for the Modern-Day PM

Ajaykumar is an experienced project manager with close to five years of IT project management experience across various domains like Banking, Telecom, Tax Audit and Assurance. He works as a PM for a French MNC. His interests include project management, agile and delivery management.

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Topics: Benefits Realization, Business Intelligence, Organizational Project Management, PMO, Portfolio Management, Strategy

The primary role of a project manager has been to successfully initiate, execute, control, monitor and close a project. In this process, the PM is expected to manage well the triple constraints of scope, cost and schedule, and deliver a quality product at the end of the project. In the process of project execution, it’s expected that the project manager manages risk and issues, caters to all stakeholders and manages them well, manages the contracts and keeps the costs under control. Anyone who has good experience and is adept with these skills could be a successful PM.

However, we are living in a very fast-paced business environment, where business conditions are changing in a jiffy. Hence, we need to ensure project managers also adapt and learn new skill sets to be able to cope with changing market conditions. We cannot afford to have project managers work in silos and limit their scope to the success of the project they are responsible for. Hence, even the project management profession has come up with new skill sets that PMs need to learn.

One such interesting dimension is connecting organization strategy with project management. IT is mostly viewed as a cost center in accounting terminology (this is a debatable topic). Organizations want to see value in terms of ROI for the projects that are getting executed. A PM needs to understand what the organizational …

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