Managing Your First Strategic Initiative? Here’s What You Need to Know
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By Kevin Korterud
Beware: Strategic initiatives aren’t the same as typical projects—they tend to be considerably more complex. For example, strategic initiatives are usually bound by some form of dramatic urgency around schedule (regulatory, market), costs (process improvement) or consumer satisfaction (subscription, satisfaction).
But the differences don’t end there. Let’s look at some other complex dimensions that must be considered when leading a strategic initiative:
1. Stakeholder Management
The stakeholder landscape is much more broad on a strategic initiative than a project. In strategic initiatives, stakeholders typically span multiple departments within a company, creating multiple primary stakeholder groups. And these stakeholder groups will often have nearly equal shares in the success of the initiative, thus creating potential authority conflicts.
In addition, there are also governance functions—risk management, legal, etc.—that will have either a primary or secondary stakeholder role.
2. Communications
The complex stakeholder landscape necessitates communication processes that serve vastly different audiences. There exists both a two-dimensional communications problem: one dimension is horizontal (i.e., across stakeholders) and the other is vertical (i.e., involving higher levels of leadership). What once was a linear communication process on a project now becomes more of a matrix process to deal with the breadth and depth of stakeholders.
Communications will need to be carefully tailored to different functions and levels of stakeholders. For example, more detail for operational functions, and simple, high-level summaries for leadership consumption.
3. Progress Tracking
Strategic initiatives bring with them inherent complexities that can quickly overpower the progress report tracking processes that are commonly used to manage projects.
For example, strategic initiatives will typically have more suppliers than on a typical project. These additional suppliers bring with them different commercial arrangements, delivery methods, status reporting formats and progress metrics. On top of that, all of these progress tracking components need to be harmonized across the various suppliers in order to achieve a cohesive and durable view of progress position.
Project managers will need to review, refine and agree on common progress tracking processes, reporting and metrics that are universally accepted by all suppliers. By creating this single harmonized view of progress tracking, you are more readily able to identify and address delivery volatility.
When first presented with the prospect of leading a strategic initiative, project managers need to balance the excitement of leading a high-visibility engagement with the practical realities of effectively and efficiently managing delivery. By putting essentials in place, project managers can successfully move on to the next step in the career journey: leading their second strategic initiative!
What essentials can your share with project managers new to strategic initiatives that will put them on the path to success?
Posted
by
Kevin Korterud
on: November 20, 2016 12:07 PM |
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Comments (21)
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Sujith Kattathara
Founder, CEO| FreelanceTeams Private Limited
Ernakulam, Kerala, India
Kevin, A great article - thank you.
I believe that the greatest challenges encountered while executing Strategic initiatives are political in nature. In many strategic initiatives, success may mean that one or other sphere of power/ influence in an organization would enhance its influence significantly, and others may see their power/ influence decline. This conflict drives lackadaisical engagement - apparently engaged stakeholders but disengaged where it counts - is what kills a large number of strategic initiatives.
At the essence of it, this is Stakeholder management - But without the support of pure PM process steps & guidelines to smooth out the road.
The way around this challenge would be to identify compromises & win-win situations for the key stakeholders or stakeholder groups - Unfortunately, this is easy to state, but very difficult to execute.
Further, unless you have allies in the competing stakeholder groups, developing true insights into the real problems - which can, in turn, help to develop real win-wins - would probably not be possible.
Reading Sun-Tzu's Art of War would be a strong recommendation (!).
Thoughts ?
- Sujith.
Rohit Kaul
Program Manager| HCL
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Thanks for an insightful article.
Lauren Hall
Project Manager - Commercial Lines| ISO Solutions/Verisk
Morristown, Nj, United States
Kevin Korterud
Associate Director | Accenture
New Albany, Oh, United States
Very glad to see the positive responses...we have all been there...or might be soon!
Sujith...thanks also for your supplementary point of vie...very much in agreement. A professor in my MBA program once told me that all political behavior is caused by a shortage of resources somewhere. So part of my stakeholder management approach involves making sure stakeholders are made whole if we happen to use their people and assets on a strategic initiative....
Leigh Espy
Project / Process Advisor| FedEx
Memphis, Tn, United States
Sujith's statement above, "At the essence of it, this is Stakeholder management - But without the support of pure PM process steps & guidelines to smooth out the road" really resonates.
Great article! Awesome input. Thanks for all that you do!
Brenda Taylor
Manager, Portfolio Commercialization| Syneos Health
Vernon Hills, United States
Excellent summary regarding strategic projects
Vincent Guerard
Coach - Trainer - Speaker - Advisor| Freelance
Mont-Royal, Quebec, Canada
Excellent article
Excellent reference from Sujith, found a few links like those two
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericjackson/2014/05/23/sun-tzus-33-best-pieces-of-leadership-advice/#2398980d3496
and
http://classics.mit.edu/Tzu/artwar.html
Denise Canty
Agile Coach, Life Coach, Author, Senior Project-Program Manager| Cenden Company
Washington, Dc, United States
I think funding for new initiatives impact strategy more than we would like to admit. Politics is one thing but strategy in business is driven typically by increasing the bottom line.
Greg Githens
Author, "How to Think Strategically." Executive & Leadership Coach| Catalyst & Cadre LLC
Lakewood Ranch, Fl, United States
Strategic initiatives are almost always programs and almost never projects. The tools of program management are much more appropriate to strategic initiatives than the tools of project management. The important insight that program management provides (that project management does not) is an emphasis on 1) alignment with strategy, 2) realization of benefits to important stakeholders.
Strategical initiatives are occasionally launched because something is urgent, but not as commonly as the author implies. Nor are costs an extremely important issue for strategic initiatives (they are important, but not typically a major driver).
I find that many project managers get stuck in a mindset ("if the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail") and try to inappropriately apply the project mindset to endeavors where the project mindset is inappropriate.
Much of the problem is that people use the word "strategic" as cheap talk to say "this is important to me." Projects and programs should align with strategy, and good strategy is much more than a goal or vision that is important to some executive stakeholder.
Kevin Korterud
Associate Director | Accenture
New Albany, Oh, United States
Hi Denise & Greg...great commentary...would agree on your point of view regarding strategy and alignment to program management.
Two of the biggest challenges we run into around this topic is the definition of a program as well as the mental model shift that project managers need to make when they begin to run programs.
Many companies have distinct financial boundaries for what they call a program; e,g, any investment over $20M. But we do have delivery initiatives that resemble programs that are lower than that budget figure. We work with our clients to help them shape the right definition of a program locally for their needs.
Making that leap to running programs as a project manager can be quite big. The most common challenge is that project managers try to run programs like a big project. In our training programs we promote the need for program leaders to spend more emphasis on deliverable inspections, quality processes, complex governance models, etc. Its key to get them out of the details and take a broader perspective with a program...
Great commentary! Off the air for a bit...Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
Christopher Ford
Manager, Mobile Application Solutions| NYS Office of Information Technology Services (ITS)
Mayfield, Ny, United States
We run into a terminology swamp when it comes to program management. Organizations often have operational program managers at the head on units. When it comes to instituting a large initiative that is actually a program, they try to fit a project manager into the role who may not have the experience or access to resources for managing multiple projects and operational efforts under what we know in PMI to be a program. Organizations seem to accept the role of project and even portfolio management with less difficulty than program management.
Christine Oddy
Project Manager| Primavera Software
Novi, Mi, United States
Very well written article regarding strategic invite, this is somehow relevant to program management and
portfolio management.
Kevin Korterud
Associate Director | Accenture
New Albany, Oh, United States
Hi Chris and Christine...thanks for the commentary. Yes indeed the notion of programs I think we have seen those situations many times. That jump from project to program manager is bigger than one usually perceives it to be. That's part of the reason my firm developed some training to get project managers to "unthink" a few things to become program managers...
Karthik T
Senior Engineering Manager| Nike
Bangalore, Karnataka, India
Useful advisory to anyone looking to set out a initiative and managing it.
Deepesh Rammoorthy
ICT Project Manager ( PMP®AgilePM®Certified ScrumMaster® (CSM®))| Australian Red Cross Blood Service
Tarneit, Vic, Australia
If I were leading my first strategic initiative, as expected, I would focus on your first two Big Ticket Items Kevin :- Stakeholder Management and Communications.
If I had the luxury of getting Stream Leads for both these areas from my Project Sponsor , that would provide specialist guidance and support to the Project and make my job a lot easier.
If my sponsor agrees, I can also bring in a Best Practice Project Management consultancy firm to provide some guidance on focus areas on Strategic Projects.
If that's not possible I will at the very least try and find out a couple of experts in the organization who have done these roles effectively in past projects and pick their brains.
I would also hold a formal Risk Analysis workshop with all the Stakeholders or their representatives in the room and engage the Company's Risk Manager to provide their specialist input and assist and direct us in identifying the Key Project Risks.
As with Any project, Enterprise Environmental Factors and Organizational Process Assets are paramount to Strategic Projects and so is the ever increasing focus on the Business Case. It all begins with the question ...."Why is it so important for the organization that this project be undertaken and be successful as compared to this other one...." ?
Kevin Korterud
Associate Director | Accenture
New Albany, Oh, United States
Thanks all for the great commentary...and happy 2017!
Hi Deepesh...would agree very much w your points, especially stakeholder mgt. I just helped with a class for program managers to learn advanced concepts in this area.
...and having an org chart is not stakeholder management nor a governance model!
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