Do you know that 11.4% of all the resources are wasted due to inferior project management processes?
Surveys show that organizations that fail to integrate project management into their strategies will increase their outright project failure rate by 2/3.
How do we overcome this challenge? To know the solution, let’s first understand the complete current scenario –
In some traditional project management approaches, every project is seen as an independent entities under the watchful eye of project managers. In general, while this allows a great deal of flexibility of vision for the project manager to take a project wherever they wish it to go, it risks diverging too far from the overall goals and aim of the organization as a whole.
However, managers are now seeing the benefits of aligning projects with organization strategy through frameworks that can help them analyze the skill sets, resource utilization, resource availability, amount of time utilized for a particular project, etc.
Strategic alignment in project management is aligning the project goals with the organization’s goals, long-term vision, and mission. Contrary to what might come to your mind when hearing strategic alignment in project management, the term does not only refer to setting and adhering to key financial metrics. It is a reasonably broad concept involving everything from important financial and quality metrics to customer satisfaction, brand recognition, and value proposition.
Understanding strategic alignment in project management is easy when you know why you are working on a project. Every project has its purpose. While some may aim to deliver a service or product, others may aim to attain intangible benefits, such as positive customer relationships or company goodwill. These strategic goals drive your everyday business efforts and transition your thoughts into desired outcomes.
When project management is aligned with organizational strategy, you can gain a sense of purpose and clear contribution towards the organization. For modern organizations, unaligned projects are seen as excess weight that can hinder a company’s overall performance.
By aligning project management goals with broader organizational goals, project managers are able to ensure that resources are well spent and clearly affect the company’s welfare. Therefore, there is a need for proactive and timely attention to the source of all the deviations.
With a strong linkage of all the departments and an aligned process to support customer retention, things like revenue, cash flow, customer satisfaction, and employee engagement become predictable.
The traditional approach of going to market includes investing organizational time and resources in building models, allocating resources, researching markets, segmenting customers, and communicating the value proposition to prospects, all at great expense.
Aligning all the teams to attract, engage, retain, and work for the customer is the key to growing business profitability. By aligning project management goals with broader organizational goals, project managers help ensure that resources are well spent and impact company welfare.
This can be achieved through a robust project management framework where the project managers can get details of all the employees, their skills, availability, allocation, and utilization.
Why strategic alignment of project management is required?
Before jumping the gun to comprehend how to align business strategy with your project management framework, let’s understand why you need to devise strategies while working on projects in the first place
Channelization of efforts
While managing projects, it’s easy to get lost in project tasks, deadlines, and resources; also, it’s easier to lose track of what you and your team set out to achieve in the long run. This is where strategic alignment aligns your processes in tune with the defined company strategies. This increases productivity, saving time and effort at the same time. Therefore, strategic alignment will come in handy every time you start working on a project, especially for time-bound projects.
Effective team collaboration
Using a project management framework, you can coordinate in real-time, reducing communication errors and ensuring all the team members work in the same direction. It also facilitates collaboration across teams. Through the real-time project status and resource allocation status, project managers can analyze the complete utilization.
Defined clarity for employees
Project management frameworks give team members an understanding of their roles and time allocated to them. This helps them to manage their time and efforts accordingly. Team members, being transparent about their roles and responsibilities and how each one contributes to the organization’s strategic goals, will come forward and commit to their completion within the set timeframe.
Billable time and invoicing –
Accurate time tracking is crucial for different types of project billing. For a business that needs to track billable hours, time-tracking software ensures that billable hours are accurately recorded, leading to transparent invoicing and a closer relationship with clients.
Empower employees to lead change
Understanding the importance of strategic alignment in project management is being aware of the fact that your team members are your most significant assets. They don’t just help you accomplish existing work but help set the tone for future endeavors.
Here, it becomes essential to understand that working in an organization is a mutually beneficial relationship. Thus, it fosters a dynamic work environment that appreciates employee efforts and provides them with an environment that helps them grow individually.
Avoid Redundancies
Having a strategic plan helps avoid redundancies while managing projects. This translates to minimized or no waste of time, effort, and resources.
So if you get access to real-time data and meaningful insights in regard to resource allocation and utilization, you and your team will be directed towards the defined path and rarely will bounce off track midway, avoiding disruption and consequent project delays.
How can this be achieved?
There are several project management software and suites available, but getting real-time insights and detailed insights on resource allocation and utilization is a tedious task. However, some data-driven decision-making tools help you gain insights into every department, and you can easily drill down to identify progress and gaps. KestrelPro is a tool that can help unlock the potential of all the departments and align them strategically. Its core functionality is real-time data aggregation, analytics, and visualization.
You will get features that can prove a game changer for your company, including –
- Informed decisions – Scale up your business with detailed reports on project budget forecasting, resource utilization, and availability.
- Cross-Departmental Strategic Alignment – Make all the departments work harmoniously towards your business goals.
- Unveil the Invisible – Extract valuable insights from piles of siloed data in your organization’s ecosystem.
You just need to book your demo and transform your business landscape. Start your KestrePro journey today –