The Strategic Project Manager

Strategy has always existed, but Michael Porter was the first to create a comprehensive framework for thinking about strategy. His initial framework, and those that followed, are rooted in basic economics, but they extend economics from an aggregated view of the world down to the industry and organizational level. Porter’s original strategic framework from the … Read more

PESTLE Analysis – also referenced as PESTEL, PEST, and a number of other variants – is a framework or evaluating macro context factors as part of strategy development. PESTLE is an acronym for Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal, and Environmental. The PESTLE analysis framework is becoming increasingly popular and relevant with the rise of environmental … Read more

The SWOT Analysis – an analysis of Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats – was developed in the 1960s at Harvard Business School and is one of the earliest strategy frameworks. As simple as it is, it is powerful and can open your eyes to the reality of your situation, both positively and negatively. It can … Read more

This article explores a strategic team building approach. It first takes into consideration the needs of the project specifically, but also the greater organizational needs. It can apply to organizations that primarily do internal projects, or to ones that do projects as a business. In building a team to staff a project, there are two … Read more

Understanding business models is a key to successful project management. Why? If you can understand the business model that you are supporting, you will be better able to create a stronger and more relevant project charter and plan, you will be in a much better position to measure your project’s success throughout execution based upon … Read more

Any project is being executed in order to ‘get a job done’. A critical, up front, strategic action for the project manager is to gain clarity on the ‘job to be done’ by the project. This is often also called the ‘product of the project’ – but maybe it goes deeper. This article looks at … Read more

Project management and organizational strategy should be a tight fit – but often are not. It would only seem natural that projects would be designed and managed based upon the reason they exist in the first place. Often it seems like ‘out of the box thinking’ to map project purpose back to organizational strategy and … Read more

Many strategies and projects have at their roots the idea of ‘network effects’. At the most basic level, network effects occur when the value of a product, service, or platform increases simply because the number of users increases. Since network effects are something that builds over time, it is critical that project managers understand what … Read more

The idea of doing ‘strategic project management’ sounds appealing. It has a buzz to it! But what exactly is strategic project management? Let’s explore and discover a good strategic project management definition. What Strategic Project Management Could Be When we start a project, we begin by asking what it is all about, what is to … Read more