Fertile Ground for Projects

Many members of the BIG stakeholder community are project, programme, and portfolio (P3) management professionals. Their shared focus is strategy delivery—because from a BIG perspective, projects and programmes are not just activities, but the mechanisms through which change happens and investment-related strategic objectives are achieved.

If you’ve followed the development of the BIG Body of Knowledge, you’ll recall its first public release on the Praxis website, where the emphasis was on integrated governance across portfolios, programmes, and projects. Adrian Dooley played a pivotal role in shaping and elevating BIG’s quality at that stage.

For those less familiar, Praxis is an online encyclopaedia for P3 management and a foundation for professional accreditation. Yet even the most capable P3 professionals are constrained by the broader organisational ecosystem in which they operate. Successful strategy delivery assumes that:

• strategy is clear,
• resources are effectively managed,
• dependencies are coordinated,
• funding flows smoothly,
• data and information are reliable, and
• culture supports accountability.

In reality, these conditions rarely hold true. Worse, fixing them often lies beyond the authority of individual projects, programmes, or even PMOs (in the broadest sense of all P3 support functions). What’s needed are cross-domain agreements and coordinated solutions—something far harder to achieve than simply asking delivery teams to “do better.”

This leads to a critical question: are we aiming too low by focusing on project delivery? Shouldn’t our primary concern be delivering on strategic objectives?

Driving professionals to “just deliver” won’t repair a flawed strategy. If governance is treated as bureaucracy rather than an enabler, the gap between strategy and execution only widens. True alignment happens at the integrated portfolio level—where investment, capacity, risk, and benefits can be balanced across the enterprise, and where governance can genuinely hard-wire strategy delivery.

Too often, frustrated P3 practitioners are left to bridge this gap alone. BIG turns that expectation around: instead of relying solely on delivery professionals, it equips organisations with the principles, structures, and roadmap to create a joined-up, portfolio-level approach—so that strategy delivery becomes the natural outcome, not a constant uphill struggle.

The BIG Body of Knowledge provides the fertile ground in which projects can succeed—by strengthening strategy delivery first.

So, rather than pouring effort into changing the means (projects), why not invest in improving the end itself—delivery of strategic objectives?

Think BIG. Build fertile ground at the portfolio level. Make governance an enabler, not a hurdle. Empower your projects and programmes to thrive—so your people can stop firefighting and start delivering.