Building the Fabric Between Strategy & Delivery

Presentation Report – APM / IASP Meeting 17/6/25.

Many our organisations are ‘purpose driven’ from the worldviews and goals of its owners. Most have a vision for how to achieve purpose, influenced by prevailing opportunities, threats and imperatives. We set a direction, but some may keep their head in the sand – but we hope to get everyone moving in the same direction.

The organisation will probably have an overarching strategy, and perhaps further enabling strategies.

It will set up organisation entities to operate and to develop value. Each kind of entity will probably have its own management methods and tools. That will generate response to the strategic asks but also innovate and generate opportunities for strategic evaluation.

Some operational units will deliver their business and their local improvement through “projects”. Larger and cross functional changes may need their own entities – organised as change portfolios or programmes. Hence, across all this, our organisations set up specialist support functions to enable us to operate and manage governance – like a Project Management Office – to drive the standard and provide assistance in managing projects.

So how do projects support strategy delivery?

1. They may help us hit the performance targets of our project based operations (customer projects, construction projects, engineering projects etc.)
2. We may use projects to develop products and assets for external and internal exploitation or use – but we may use ‘Product Management’ methods for that, and agile delivery, not projects at all.
3. We may use projects to underpin the change programmes in our portfolio of cross functional change objectives

To think about:

Delivery entities of all forms (project, product, function, service unit..)

• all seek resources and funds ultimately from the same pot
• prioritisation must be used to establish fair accountability across operations, value creation and change – but how often is this systematic and information based vs leader led value judgement?
• all manage issues, risks, tasks, actions and decisions – often in different ways
• We have dependencies across domains – how can we see / manage this?
• all manage issues, risks, tasks, actions and decisions?
• all need performance data (historical and forecast)

…but this information is often siloed and unreliable, shared by a network of collate-send-interpret processes

 Scary things

• At the APM PMO Conference last June, we found that none of the c.100 delegates would put their hand up to knowing who supported the connection of strategy to delivery. None.
• At the APM Governance SIG event in October – we asked 400 people to comment on their connection of strategy to delivery in terms of clarity and communication, effective cascade, prioritisation, establishment of metrics and availability of information and data – and by far the majority of answers was negative
• Conclusion: the connection of strategy to delivery is poor, and we don’t know who is supporting the connection of the two.

Some points to challenge:

• Strategic drivers will change – if your organisation needs to shift focus – how agile are you at shifting what you do?
• Strategy delivery is not determined fully by project delivery – Strategy is accomplished through performance and value creation which may not be achieved through projects,
• If we are trying to align out projects to strategic objectives – does the strategic objective owner know? If not spawned out of the strategy – how can the project be strategic (as in pertaining to a strategy)?

What is the answer? Improve project delivery (of course) but think about putting in place a suitable fabric to bind strategy and delivery – all forms of it. Think BIG.

David Dunning from the BIG CIC joined the APM Yorkshire and North Lincolnshire Network on a joint event,  at which he explored the intersection of strategy and project management, and how project management can support and align with wider strategic goals.

 – YouTube – Building the Fabric Between Strategy & Delivery

 – PDF – Building the Fabric Between Strategy & Delivery

Please Contact us to find out more, or become a BIG Member.