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Implementing Strategy Through Project

Management: The Importance of
Managing the Project Front-end
Peter W.G. Morris

Introduction
This chapter, if it succeeds, will open wider two doors in management theory
and practice: one, to show concretely how corporate and business strategy
implementation can be effected via project management, something rarely
addressed in the academic literature; two, to show how project manage-
ment, as a discipline, can contribute to strategic management. In doing, so
it should clarify the confusion which has crept into perceptions of what pro-
gramme and project management are. It will illustrate the importance of
work done in the project “front-end”. It will stress why value and benefits,
and other measures of effectiveness may be more significant than the tra-
ditional project management efficiency measures of budget, schedule and
scope attainment. And finally, it will show the importance of leadership in
achieving this.
The underlying paradigm adopted is that of managing projects as organ-
isational entities: the chapter does not take project management as an
execution-only oriented discipline, with some other discipline being con-
cerned with project definition (a view which prevails in the field and which
can be inadequate and misleading). It addresses instead the discipline (or dis-
ciplines) required to manage projects successfully. This includes what needs
to be managed in developing and defining projects, as well as in building,
completing and operating them.

Strategy implementation
Business, or corporate strategy, occupies a central place in management
teaching, research and practice, and yet when it comes to the implemen-
tation of strategy there is almost nothing in the scholarly literature on the
role of projects or project management. This seems strange, since projects
are the natural vehicles for implementing strategy.1

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© Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 2009
40 Aligning Projects

For many strategy theorists, having cast one’s strategy, the next task con-
cerns the decisions affecting project selection and resourcing – the analytical
world of managing the project portfolio (Archer and Ghasemsadeh, 1999;
Cooper et al., 1998; Rajegopal et al., 2007). A much more popular and
populist field, however, is the management actions of the individual exec-
utive in shaping and implementing strategy and, in particular, the role of
the CEO (Montgomery, 2008). The term strategy, indeed, comes from the
Greek strategos meaning “the General”, or more literally “the leader of the
army”. Thus Mintzberg, for example, has stressed the need to craft strat-
egy to fit the organisation’s context, and the conditions unfolding around
its realisation (1987a), emphasising the importance of reacting effectively
to “emergent” events, rather than simply following “deliberate” processes
and plans (1987b). Ploy, perspective and pattern, all requiring insight and
judgement, are as important, Mintzberg contends, as position and plan.
Other authors approach issues in strategy implementation from a more
process-oriented perspective (Brown and Eisenhardt, 1997; Bryson and Del-
becq, 1979; Eden and Ackermann, 1998; Eisenhardt, 1989; Loch, 2000;
Thompson and Strickland, 1995), a perspective taken to almost mechanis-
tic steps by Kaplan and Norton (2004, 2008). Others, such as Artto and
Dietrich (2004) and Burgelman and Doz (2001), take a more synoptic view,
stressing process, but also highlighting the importance of the CEO’s strate-
gic judgement. Similarly, Kotter (1996) emphasises the role of leadership,
while proffering an eight-step process to implementing strategy: a sense
of urgency, organisation, vision and strategy, communicating, empowering,
creating short-term wins, consolidating, and institutionalising.
EDS, the consultancy company, offers a very similar sequence for man-
aging organisational change (Pendlebury et al.,1998) with project manage-
ment – as execution/delivery management – making an unusual appearance,
as their fourth step – “Delivering”. Change management, in fact, has
an extensive literature on strategy implementation (Bossidy et al., 2002;
Bridges, 1996; Cameron and Green, 2005; Cohen, 2005; Gilbert et al., 2007;
Luecke, 2003), though generally with little, if any, reference to projects or
project management.
No one in fact, from the business literature angle, is really connecting the
implementation of business strategy with the way projects and programmes
are shaped and executed. Yet, these are the normal vehicles for managing
capital expenditure and, some would argue, for managing a wider variety
of change.2 Even the Association for Project Management (APM), the UK’s
professional project management body, in its otherwise excellent guidance
on project governance, only refers to the need for “a coherent relationship
[to] be demonstrated between the business strategy and the project/program
portfolio” (APM, 2004). It says nothing about how project management can
help shape the emerging strategy in such a way that its realisation aligns with