Strategic Planning and Project Management: 5 Ways to Combine Them
Strategic planning and project management – it may not be obvious how these two management tasks complement each other. However, an approach that incorporates both has significantly improved the long term planning of many organisations. Embarking on strategic planning as you would any other project assists managers in gaining awareness of any underlying issues, as well as the most effective ways to address them. Further, this kind of approach helps to ensure that all projects’ scheduling and execution are realistic and smooth.
Canada Bay City Council in NSW, for example, did exactly that. They are now successfully on track for their rolling four-year Capital Delivery Program, and 10-year plan. Here’s 5 key ways that they used strategic planning and project management in conjunction to create solid long-term plans.
1. Identify Strategic Objectives and Planning
This means accurately identifying areas in your organisational processes which require attention, and choosing actions to address them effectively. To that end, many organisations use project management solutions to gain greater visibility over the progress of their projects and portfolios. However, these solutions also provide valuable insights into resources, finances, scheduling, and other aspects of your organisation’s operations. Reviewing metrics or reports generated by your project portfolio management (PPM) solution helps you identify which areas of project delivery require more attention. In addition, requesting your project managers thoughts on the your organisation’s processes and culture might reveal some starting points for further work.
Once you identify strategic objectives, project management solutions can be used to break down strategic plans into smaller projects and initiatives. This is how Canada Bay used its pmo365 solution. This practice of breaking down strategic goals into actionable projects is particularly helpful when managing a long-term plan, where organisational initiatives are often complex and interdependent. And, with a powerful project management solution, you can keep on top of many timelines, dependencies, resource allocation, and milestones.
2. Resource Allocation
Long-term strategic planning and project management have significant overlap, especially in the allocation of resources. Gartner says that “effective finance strategic planning connects your enterprise strategy to specific initiatives… [providing] a clear roadmap to deliver on your business goals.”
You can investigate the organisation’s financial position using your PPM solution, especially if that solution is connected with your ERP. Some PPM solutions provide insights into your CapEx and OpEx expenses. If yours includes a ROI or strategic alignment calculator, you can evaluate the long-term benefits yield of potential CapEx expenses. Canada Bay City Council used these resource allocation tools to justify their investment in pmo365 to their executive team. From there, they were able to leverage the solution’s PPM tools to prioritise each of their projects in accordance with their strategic plans.
3. Project Scheduling
It’s no secret that strategic planning and project management both require realistic project scheduling. As soon as a strategic goal has a plan attached to it, it effectively becomes a organisational project. So, if you’re unsure how to start scheduling a strategic objective, approach it as you would a project.
It’s worth taking the time to develop detailed project schedules for your objective: define tasks and dependencies, set deadlines, and assign resources. (To learn how to practice realistic project scheduling, check out our blog post on scope creep.)
Use your PPM solution to track KPIs and generate informative reports on your progress towards long-term strategic plans. This greatly improves the visibility of project milestones, deliverables, and dependencies for stakeholders. Canada Bay City Council is using pmo365‘s project scheduling capabilities to track their 10-year plan, and have met all the planned milestones so far.
4. Collaboration and Communication
Organisations usually experience an immediate increase in collaboration when they start using a cloud-based PPM solution. This is because all real-time project data and updates are readily accessible by team members, stakeholders, and executives. The same applies to strategic planning. Instead of having to reconcile many versions of the same Excel sheet scattered across different team members’ hard drives, everyone is operating from the same page when the organisation is connected to an integrated PPM solution.
Canada Bay City Council found that pmo365‘s cloud native and integrated Apps, Flows, Reports and Dashboards fostered a culture of collaboration and communication. The benefits were further compounded by the cohesive relationship ot built between the council’s long-term strategic planning and its project management teams.
5. Risk Management
As in project management, it’s equally important to consider risks when managing a strategic plan. There are various ways to mitigate risk and many PPM solutions have built-in RAID logs to mange risks, issues and all other factors that may impact delivery.
Canada Bay City Council has made good use of the embedded project governance capabilities built into pmo365. As a result, the execution of their strategic plans has been clearly defined, and responses to mitigate the risks and issues affecting their 10 year plan have been set up at an organisational level to future proof their strategic ‘project’.
pmo365, Strategic Planning and Project Management
If you’re looking into project management solutions, PPM software, or how to start your strategic planning, check out how pmo365 can benefit your organisation. Book a demo here for a pmo365 expert show you the specific features of pmo365 can work for you.
IIR: Introduce, Integrate, Replace
Step 01
Introduce
You cannot run a portfolio on Excel and PowerPoint alone.
Project portfolio management is the discipline of seeing every project in one place, prioritising the work that matters, allocating people against demand, and governing delivery with real numbers. It is not optional at any serious scale. The moment you have more projects than one person can hold in their head, you need a single, current view of status, schedule, cost, resource and risk.
Excel and PowerPoint feel free because there is no licence conversation. The real cost is elsewhere. It is the hours spent maintaining workbooks, the version confusion, and the numbers that go stale the moment they are pasted.
A spreadsheet cannot tell you, on demand, which projects are at risk, where your people are over-committed next quarter, or how much of the portfolio budget is actually spent.
Introducing a proper PPM platform is the first step. Not to add another tool for its own sake, but to give the portfolio one place where the data lives together and stays live.
Step 02
Integrate
The instinct after buying a PPM platform is to make everyone move into it. That is the fastest way to fail. Project managers already have tools they trust, and finance already has systems of record. Force a migration on day one and you get resistance, shadow spreadsheets, and a dataset nobody believes.
Integrate first. Meet the data where it already is. Two directions matter.
Direction 01
Enterprise systems
Connect to the finance or ERP layer so actuals, commitments and budgets flow in automatically. Reporting stops being a monthly reconciliation and becomes a live view. Nobody rekeys a spend figure again.
Direction 02
The tools PMs already use
The direction most platforms neglect, and arguably the more important. The portfolio should read from the PM's own tools, not force people to abandon them.
The reason this matters is simple. That data is already there, and it is kept current by the person closest to it. When the portfolio reads directly from these sources, the status report updates itself. No chasing, no copy and paste, no reporting lag. The PM keeps working the way they always have, and the board gets a live picture as a side effect.
Step 03
Replace
Integration buys you two things: trust, and live data. Once both are in place, you look at what can go.
Every organisation carries tools and spreadsheets that either do not do the job well or carry a heavy maintenance overhead. The classic example is the resource spreadsheet. It is a workbook someone maintains by hand to track who is on what. It is always slightly out of date, owned by one person, and impossible to reconcile against real demand.
Replace it with the equivalent function in your PPM.
A proper demand management capability does what the spreadsheet was reaching for, with none of the overhead. It models demand against capacity across the whole portfolio, updates as projects shift, and needs no manual upkeep.
Replace deliberately, one function at a time, and only after the platform has earned it. The test is simple: if a spreadsheet is high overhead or low quality, and the platform does the same job natively, retire the spreadsheet.
The payoff
You stop producing reports and start reading them
Follow IIR and the nature of reporting changes. The status view is current because it is fed by the tools people already use and the systems that already hold the money. The overhead that used to consume the last week of every month disappears, because there is nothing to assemble.
That is the whole point of real-time reporting. Not a prettier deck, but a portfolio you can look at any day of the month and trust, at a fraction of the effort it takes today.
Built on Microsoft 365. Native ground for IIR.
pmo365 integrates with the tools your teams already run in, so the path from Introduce to Integrate to Replace is a natural progression rather than a rip and replace.