In today’s global economy, every business is facing challenges those were never seen before.

Everyone is struggling to be more successful, solve the pressure of quarter-on-quarter growth and sustain it, understand and manage the business impact of social media, retain the customers, and then identify new strategic initiatives to avoid becoming obsolete. Business uncertainty is more prominent today than in the past due to global debt and economic changes. Strategies that worked yesterday are not working today due to the speed of technological and economic changes. Competitive space is changing and getting extended due to ease in starting a business. Internal stress has increased due to complexity of projects and programs executed across global landscape due to different cultures, languages, processes and requirements. Organizations need to solve this dynamic puzzle by creating enhanced customer experience at a greater speed to survive and outshine the competition.

The ability to rapidly adapt to change and, more importantly, drive that change, has become a survival factors for businesses across the economic spectrum. A company can outperform competition only if it can establish a difference that it can preserve. It must deliver comparable or better business value at cheaper price than the nearest competition. Successful companies have started realizing the tremendous impact of project management in overall accomplishment of organizational strategy.

As we know market demands and business needs push an organization to become innovative, identify new ways to do business, improve efficiency or establish better way to serve customers. So by executing projects that are aligned with the organizational strategy will improve competitive edge and in turn enable the business to create profits for itself and for its shareholders.

External conditions can be favorable or unfavorable. But to be truly successful or replicate the success, an organization must establish repeatable process predicated upon speed and quality of execution.

Project Management discipline creates the repeatable process for success. It provides a structured framework to create reusable assets or services, better visibility on return and investments, better stakeholder engagements, improved customer-partner relationships, and overall helps in defining a predictable future. It helps in monitoring and improving productivity, better product quality, control and usage of resources and a focused customer. It allows planning for future that we can only predict. It provides us risk management capabilities to hedge against the unseen future.

Most of the organizations adopt project management to deliver projects on time, within budget and quality. Instead of only focusing on a tactical nature of project management organizations shall focus on strategic achievement of project value.

Successful project management is no longer a simple, triple constraint option, getting it out of the door fast, cheap, and on spec is not enough to guarantee future profits in a new dynamic economy. We as project manager shall focus on the strategic link for getting our project from the business case to the actual achievement of the project business benefits. A different way of thinking about project execution with a strategic lens is needed and we should ask ourselves:

How am I doing against my competition?

Why are we better? Can we continue to
be better?

How can we directly add value to our customers?

What are our competitive advantages?

The above questions will help us connect the gap between strategy made by the top executives and can be delivered as projects by the tactical project managers. The answers will go far towards determining how well we are poised to survive and prosper into future.