The importance of strategic alignment in project management

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What is strategic alignment in strategic management?

Strategic alignment is the process of environmental scanning to identify the strength and weaknesses of your internal organization and to identify opportunities and threats concerning your external environment. A strategically aligned business formulates its strategies with a clear vision and mission: defining its purpose and intent and what it offers its employees, customers, and owners–in addition to policies and general strategies, leading to strategy formulation, including programs, budgets, and procedures–all in the purpose of evaluation and control of actual results. Strategic alignment comprises operations, methods, and prescribed practices that work together to achieve long-term company goals. 

The development of a strategy is about articulating what needs to be changed to move from the current state to the future desired status quo. 

Other reasons for the significance of strategic alignment are that it is not a return on investment. It instead includes financial goals related to market share and distribution efficiency and more strategic objectives in terms of timely deliveries, customer satisfaction, and quality improvement.

What are the benefits of strategic alignment?

Going through a project prioritization process has several benefits; we have summarized below six significant benefits:

1. Project success rate: projects aligned to strategy are 57% more likely to deliver their business benefit. They are also 50% more likely to finish on time and 45% more likely to stay within budget.

2. Focus on value creation: real value growth comes from projects aligned with strategy. The more you focus on high-value tasks and associate resources with these high-value ones, you will naturally deliver more value.

3. More substantial executive sponsorship: there is better, more robust engagement from executives to projects that have value and are important enough. So, how do you achieve that? Simply aligning your projects to your strategic goals automatically leads to enhanced engagement by your execs.

4. Eliminate waste: as in actually eliminating waste. When aligning projects to strategy, around 10% to 40% of important projects at a particular time will automatically go away. Just imagine the efficiency.

5. Secure the PMO: the more your projects have value, the more you will add value. Understanding the benefits of aligning projects to strategy and following this approach will make you thrive.

6. Clearer resource allocation decisions: when projects are aligned to strategy, you will have the advantage of quantifying your project’s value. This will solve resource allocation problems and clarify which projects are essential. No more “loudest voice wins.”