Everybody knows you should ensure all of your projects align with and contribute to your organization’s strategy (and its amazing how many current projects don’t), but how?

Just taking the strategic statements of the CEO (eg “We want to double the profit in five years”) does not help as most projects will be able to point to these types of statement for their justification.

Taking the strategic (or operational) plan is equally useless as these plans are not designed to allow you to objectively score your project’s strategic contribution.

What you need is a simple Strategic Contribution measurement process that allows anyone in the organization to objectively ‘score’ where, how and how much their project contributes to the agreed strategy (and that works even when there is no defined strategy).

So this “How to measure your project's strategic contribution” guide takes you through a simple process whereby you can extract, weight and test your organization’s strategy and strategic imperatives as a basis for each project scoring it’s strategic contribution.

We give you the workshop slides to take a team of managers (it does not have to be the management board) through a process to generate the bases of your strategic measurement process.

We then take you through the process to convert the workshop’s outputs into a “Strategic Alignment Matrix” that can be used by all projects and allow their strategic contribution scores to be normalized to ensure consistency across the organization and prevent ‘gaming’.

Simple, standard, objective strategic contribution scores — the value delivery difference.

Can be used to generate strategic contribution measurement processes for the enterprise, within a business unit or even just within a department (we’ve developed many for IT departments to control demand).

Benefits

This guide

1. provides a proven approach to effective and objective strategic contribution assessment
2. captures the organization’s strategy onto one page of weighted strategic imperatives allowing easy use
3. generates a (normalized) score so that very different projects can be compared on a common basis across the organization
4. enables easy normalization to prevent ‘gaming’ and inconsistencies
5. enables the portfolio’s strategic contribution mix to be assessed at the macro “strategic stream” level as well as at each strategic imperative level allowing the degree of focus on each strategy/imperative to be monitored and reported — are we actually implementing our strategy?
6. makes a critical project evaluation and prioritization process easy
7. enables the same process to be used at corporate planning time as well as in business cases increasing the value of the corporate plans and culling non-strategically aligned projects early
8. is easily updatable when strategies and business imperatives change
9. provides an objective basis for re-prioritizing projects if some have to be culled.
   
   

Who should use

1. PMO - to enable you develop a simple, objective Strategic Contribution measurement process for all projects  
2. Project team - to enable you to objectively ‘score’ your project’s strategic contribution
3. Business - to guide you through the process of strategic contribution scoring
4. Governance team - to enable you to know how your project’s strategic score was generated.

Contents

1. Understanding the strategic alignment
2. Understanding the end-to-end strategic alignment framework generation process
3. How to create a strategic alignment framework
4. How to conduct the “Strategy Capture Workshop”
5. How to draft a strategic strategic alignment framework
6. How to field test your strategic alignment framework
7. How to generate your strategic alignment framework “how to ...” guide
8. How to implement a strategic alignment process
9. How keep the strategic alignment framework up to date

Bonus

Strategic Alignment Framework Development Workshop Slides
Two sets of slides for taking the selected participants through the initial strategic workshop — one set to generate an enterprise Strategic Alignment Framework and another set to develop a departmental one. These slides allow you to generate and capture the raw material. (Includes pre-workshop questions sheets.)

Example Strategic Alignment Framework
Full example of a Framework so you can see what your result should look like and how it can be used.

Proforma Strategic Alignment Framework
Blank baseline document that you can populate to bring your Strategic Alignment Framework into operation.

Selecting projects
A Value Delivery Management article by Jed Simms that uses a house-choice analogy to show how strategic contribution is a critical dimension to project evaluation, prioritization and approval decisions.

Who’s on first?
A Value Delivery Management article by Jed Simms that leverages off the famous comedy duo Abbot and Costello’s baseball skit called “Who’s on first” and discusses which of the project evaluation criteria is the most important and should take primacy in prioritization.