We have defined our strategic objectives and now we need to look at how we are going to get after them.
A lot of big businesses have a project management office that manages the programme of work for the year and have project managers, business analysis and solution architects that collectively work on a project to complete a piece of work.
As far as a project owner and/or sponsor is concerned this is a great model and they can define their requirement and get a solution implemented through the solution delivery lifecycle.
What is sometimes forgotten when you work on projects is that generally your project is part of a greater programme and what is more commonly missed is that those programmes exist to help achieve a strategic objective.
With the structure of corporate being quite hierarchical with multiple department heads wanting to get their project funded the programme of work can get messy very quickly. Linking the Strategy objectives to each programme and then project can help prioritise what is important and what will give the business the biggest bang for buck!
In order to keep programme planning simple I am going to take our example from chapter 4 – Just Law and I am going to work down from the Strategic objectives. Be well aware that most companies’ programmes of work are already in flight from the year before and strategic objectives are hardly even linked or used to prioritise one programme against another – this is changing however!
In the case of Just Law we have our 3 strategic objectives which we examined in more detail. To meet SO1 John firstly needs to work out how he plans to get more clients in the door.
For S02 John’s needs a change project to reduce steps in his current sales and purchase management process and finally for S03 johns needs to have a small recruitment project to find and hire the right lawyer.
As I have been involved in many projects I would go ahead and state that John will have a programme consisting of at least 3 projects: 1. Investigate the options for increasing client number and implement, Implement a streamline sales and purchase process and recruit a lawyer.
Seeing as John wants to increase revenue this year through client number he will use a reserve fund to hire a business analyst who has recruitment skills to help him get after this change programme.