There is a discussion of sorts on LinkedIn about project management and competency that moved to the notion of strategy and how PMs are connected to strategy. Lots of diverse opinions. Many have suggested strategy for project based organizations is like the strategy we have read about in places like The Art of War or Carl von Clausewitz.
This warfare approach is exhibited in several of the contributors to the LinkedIn discussion. Combative, easily insulted, or even the feeling of being "attacked." This is not the approach to strategy needed for managing projects or running businesses. It's the strategy for winning the argument, while at the same time, contributing little to the profession of project management.
Before adopting the simple definitions of strategy from Clausewitz and Sun Tzu, take time to read Makers of Modern Strategy to get a flavor of the variety of approaches to strategy, beyond the populist descriptions. But more importantly is the naive assumption that the strategies described by Tzu, Clausewitz, and many in the Makers of Modern Strategy are applicable to modern business.
One problem with connecting strategy with project management based on Clausewitz and others is
Clausewitz himself, setting no great store in absolute definitions, varied the meaning of strategy according to the matter at hand.
This creates the basis for much confusion, when trying to speak about strategy. Makers of Modern Strategy show us that the definitions of strategy of Clausewitz and Tzu are both naïve and simple minded and should not be used as the basis for much of anything when trying to connect project management with strategy in the business domain.
First - How Are Strategy and Projects Connected
Projects execute strategies. Projects are based on ideas and objectives derived from strategies. In the project management paradigm strategic planning provides ideas - Project Management acheives the results. It's the project that drives the strategic results.
Here's the basis for discussing strategy from the business leaders in "strategy making." Strategic Leadership: Managing the Strategy-Making Process for Competitive Advantage is a sample of the wealth of materials that can guide your efforts of connecting strategy making with management of the projects that implement strategy.
An Actual Strategy Document Example
Here's an extract from a "Strategy" document I produced in 1998 for an office furnitue client, when I was assigned to the "strategy making" team.
Strategy is creating fit among a company’s activities. The success of a strategy depends on doing many things well – not just a few. The things that are done well must operate within a close nit system. If there is no fit among the activities, there is no distinctive strategy and little to sustain the strategic deployment process. Management then reverts to the simpler task of overseeing independent functions. When this occurs operational effectiveness determines the relative performance of the organization. [1]
Improving operational effectiveness is a necessary part of management, but it is not strategy. In confusing the two, managers will be unintentionally backed into a way of thinking about competition that drives the business support processes (IT) away from the strategic support and toward the tactical improvement of operational effectiveness.
Managers must be able to clearly distinguish operational effectiveness from strategy. Both are essential, but the two agendas are different. The operational effectiveness agenda involves continual improvement business processes that have no trade–offs associated with them. The operational effectiveness agenda is the proper place for constant change, flexibility, and relentless efforts to achieve best practices. In contrast, the strategic agenda is the place for making clear tradeoffs and tightening the fit between the participating business components. Strategy involves the continual search for ways to reinforce and extend the company’s position in the market place.
The concept of fit among functional units is one of the oldest ideas in strategy. Gradually however, it has been supplanted with new concepts of core competencies, critical resources and key success factors. In fact fit is far more critical to the success of the IT systems than is realized. [1] Strategic fit among the various systems components and the business processes they support is fundamental not only to competitive advantage but also to the sustainability of that advantage.
Fit among a company’s activities creates pressures and incentives to improve operational effectiveness. Fit means that poor performance in one activity will degrade the performance in others, so that weaknesses are exposed drawing management’s attention. Conversely, with increasing fit, improvements of one activity will pay dividends in other areas. The challenge now is to create fit among the IT components and their matching business components.
[1] “What is Strategy,” M. E. Porter, Harvard Business Review, Volume 74, Number 6, pp. 61–78.
IT Strategy is Not Like Other Business Strategies
The IT Strategy contains three (3) major themes. These themes form the foundation of the IT Strategy as well as the tactical processes that will be deployed in support of these strategies.
- Business improvements are enabled by Information Technology that is integrated not disintegrated. This integration must be horizontal versus vertical. Horizontal systems remove islands of information and build bridges between the business units. In this integrated system, multiple data sources are made transparent to the end users as well as the applications that utilize them.
- Information Technology requirements are always growing, changing, and being extended. The Information Technology is no longer static, but dynamic adapting to the changing business requirements.
- Information Technology is about abstractions. If only hardware, software and data were the only foundations of a system, then Information Technology would not be able to keep pace with the business requirements. Instead, business processes, objects and services are the foundation of the system, which then drive the business processes in their adaptation of the changing market forces.
What is System Architecure in the Presence of Strategy?
If we were setting out to build a home, we would first lay out the floor plans, grouping each room by function and placing structural items within each room according to their best utility. This is not an arbitrary process – it is architecture. Moving from home design to IT system design does not change the process. Grouping data and processes into information systems creates the rooms of the system architecture. Arranging the data and processes for the best utility is the result of deploying an architecture. Many of the attributes of building architecture are applicable to system architecture. Form, function, best use of resources and materials, human interaction, reuse of design, longevity of the design decisions, robustness of the resulting entities are all attributes of well designed buildings and well designed computer systems. [2]
In general, an architecture is a set of rules that defines a unified and coherent structure consisting of constituent parts and connections that establish how those parts fit and work together. An architecture may be conceptualized from a specific perspective focusing on an aspect or view of its subject. These architectural perspectives themselves can become components in a higher–level architecture serving to integrate and unify them into a higher level structure.
The architecture must define the rules, guidelines, or constraints for creating conformant implementations of the system. While this architecture does not specify the details on any implementation, it does establish guidelines that must be observed in making implementation choices. These conditions are particularly important for component architectures that embody extensibility features to allow additional capabilities to be added to previously specified parts. [3] This is the case where Data Management is the initial deployment activity followed by more complex system components.
By adopting a system architecture motivation as the basis for the IT Strategy, several benefits result:
- Business processes are streamlined – a fundamental benefit to building enterprise information architecture is the discovery and elimination of redundancy in the business processes themselves. In effect, it can drive the re-engineering the business processes it is designed to support. This occurs during the construction of the information architecture. By revealing the different organizational views of the same processes and data, any redundancies can be documented and dealt with. The fundamental approach to building the information architecture is to focus on data, process and their interaction.
- Systems information complexity is reduced – the architectural framework reduces information system complexity by identifying and eliminating redundancy in data and software. The resulting enterprise information architecture will have significantly fewer applications and databases as well as a resulting reduction in intersystem links. This simplification also leads to significantly reduced costs. Some of those recovered costs can and should be reinvested into further information system improvements. This reinvestment activity becomes the raison d’état for the enterprise–wide system deployment.
- Enterprise–wide integration is enabled through data sharing and consolidation – the information architecture identifies the points to deploy standards for shared data. For example, most Kimball business units hold a wealth of data about products, customers, and manufacturing processes. However, this information is locked within the confines of the business unit specific applications. The information architecture forces compatibility for shared enterprise data. This compatible information can be stripped out of operational systems, merged to provide an enterprise view, and stored in data repositories. In addition, data standards streamline the operational architecture by eliminating the need to translate or move data between systems. A well–designed architecture not only streamlines the internal information value chain, but it can provide the infrastructure necessary to link information value chains between business units or allow effortless substitution of information value chains.
- Rapid evolution to new technologies is enabled – client / server and object–oriented technology revolves around the understanding of data and the processes that create and access this data. Since the enterprise information architecture is structured around data and process and not redundant organizational views of the same thing, the application of client / server and object–oriented technologies is much cleaner. Attempting to move to these new technologies without an enterprise information architecture will result in the eventual rework of the newly deployed system.
