According to a study by The Economist Intelligence Unit, 61% of CEOs admitted their organizations struggle to bridge the gap from Strategy to Execution. I believe this is because much has been shared regarding best practices of project management and strategic project portfolio analysis, but the "middle" is still very blurry. For example, project selection for strategic alignment is well understood (I think?) and once selected and approved I believe project execution is well understood. But what's not clear is how to manage these projects together, within organization budgets and constraints, so that the organization can get the expected return.
In my own experience, project selection is accomplished with lots of careful portfolio analysis and internal debates, then projects are assigned to project managers and each one builds their own kingdoms around their projects. Then things start to fall apart slowly. Communication gaps, lack of coordination between projects, and most notably, lack of concern for dependencies to and from other projects! Most project managers tend to care deeply about completing their own projects, which is what they are supposed to do. You could argue that it is the PMO or the Program Management Office job to be the "bridge", to coordinate the linkages between projects in a program or a portfolio. But until organizations make it the project managers' responsibility to care about their impacts to other projects, I believe this gap will remain and organizations will struggle to deliver on their strategies through projects.
