Connecting Project & Strategy Management through Integrated Governance

Event Summary from the APM Governance Interest Network event, 11th October ’24

Introduction

Effective strategy delivery is fundamental to organisational success and long-term purpose. Yet it is widely recognised that many organisations struggle to translate strategy into sustained outcomes. Within the project delivery community, PMO and P3 Governance professionals are often closest to the work of turning intent into action, managing the change that strategy demands.

A persistent challenge is the weak connection between organisational purpose, strategic intent, and the practical mechanisms of delivery. Issues of clarity, communication and delegation surface repeatedly, undermining even well-conceived strategies. Objectives are set, but the pathways for making them real are often fragmented or ambiguous.

At the same time, business units and product teams are accountable for performance and value creation targets of their own. These pressures frequently compete with enterprise-level strategic priorities. The resulting tension – over funding, resources, sequencing and leadership attention – adds significant complexity to strategy delivery. This complexity shows up as poor prioritisation, limited visibility of progress, weak performance control, low organisational agility, and poor integration across functions.

While PMOs and P3 Governance professionals can address parts of this landscape, many of the underlying issues sit outside any clearly owned remit. At a recent APM PMO event, participants struggled to identify who, if anyone, was responsible for ensuring the organisation as a whole was supported to connect strategy with delivery. This absence of ownership is itself a governance failure.

Unless the connection between strategy and delivery is deliberately strengthened, and governance across strategy, portfolios, delivery and operations becomes more systematic, organisations will continue to struggle. This challenge is intensifying as organisations expand their purpose to include social and environmental objectives, further increasing the demands placed on governance and execution.

The question, then, is not whether organisations need to improve strategy delivery, but who is best placed to step into the gap. Can PMOs and P3 Governance professionals broaden their role beyond managing change initiatives to help shape how strategy is delivered end-to-end? And if not them, who?

Event Details

On 11 October, the APM Governance Interest Network hosted the first in a series of events aimed at equipping PMO and P3 Governance professionals to step more confidently into the space between strategy and delivery.

The webinar explored the practical realities of strategy delivery from a P3 perspective, focusing on the gaps that often exist between support for strategy and support for portfolios, programmes and projects. Presented by David Dunning, Greg Krawczyk and Martin Samphire, the session examined why organisations struggle to deliver strategy and how governance capability can be applied more broadly to address this.

The event introduced positioning statements on the nature of strategy delivery, the inherent complexity of making it work in practice, and the success rates organisations typically achieve. An interactive segment invited live input from more than 360 attendees on common strategy delivery pain points, generating a real-time word cloud and enabling immediate panel responses.

Topics explored included:

• Clarifying and communicating strategic objectives.
• Cascading strategy into actionable sub-objectives with clear accountability.
• Systematically prioritizing objectives to enable effective allocation of resources, leadership time, and funding.
• Monitoring progress and performance.
• Operating a review cycle to assess progress, performance, and future forecasts.
• Supplying the data needed for quick decision-making, escalations, and referrals.

The session also introduced the Business Integrated Governance Body of Knowledge (BIG BoK), which brings together purpose, governance, accountability, information and data, business support and assurance, and leadership into a single integrated view of how organisations operate.

Participants were encouraged to think differently about their role – applying the same disciplines used to govern projects and programmes to the organisation as a whole. The session challenged PMOs and governance professionals to extend their expertise beyond change delivery into business-as-usual and value creation, where many of the same principles already apply.

Overall Conclusion

The event reinforced a consistent set of challenges facing organisations today: weak alignment between purpose and objectives, fragmented governance, poor prioritisation, siloed information, inconsistent accountability, and limited empowerment. While these issues are widely recognised, they persist because responsibility for addressing them is diffuse and often unowned.

Cultural factors – particularly reactive behaviours, functional silos and the absence of a genuine “one team” mindset – continue to undermine strategy execution. Tools and processes exist, but they are rarely integrated in a way that supports coherent decision-making and delivery at an organisational level.

Encouragingly, there was strong interest in frameworks such as Business Integrated Governance as a way to address these challenges. Participants recognised that improving strategy delivery is not primarily a tooling problem, but a governance one. With clearer objectives, stronger accountability, better-designed information flows and more integrated governance, organisations can significantly improve their ability to deliver strategy in practice.

The opportunity now is for PMO and P3 Governance professionals to step into this space deliberately, using their existing strengths to help organisations move from strategy as intent to strategy as sustained outcome.

Usable Session Outputs

Who should be interested in the session outputs?

• PMO Leaders who are struggling to support strategic projects and programmes
• PMO Directors to cannot see how strategy is driving change or how projects are enabling strategy
• Governance Professionals who want to see effective decision making, application of policy and process to strategy delivery
• Operations and finance directors who want to see funds / resources deployed in line with strategic priorities
• Strategic leadership who want to see effective strategy delivery
• More stakeholder profiles here

Resources include: