Program management as one method to align strategy with the projects

1. Program Management: Alignment between strategy and the projects
(By Djoni Wibisono, PMP, PgMP, CSM)
This topic comes into most organizations to ensure the result of projects will bring
achievement of organization’s strategic objectives. There are studies or articles how
to make reasonable linkage between strategy and projects.
Mostly strategic management method aims to develop and re-communicate
strategic objectives to stakeholders, who also made an approach to identify the
target and its related activities. Meanwhile the project management methodology
gives contribution to the completion of the project and its management efficiency.
However, the method at a strategic level cannot ensure that initiatives can be
implemented, while the methods at the project level cannot be sure that the project
aligned with the organization's strategy and effectively will give a good value. The
success of the project is generally assessed on the balancing of project constraints.
So there is limited concern that the project will contribute enough change to
organization.
When I learned book of “The Standard for Program management”, Program
management is one of the methods to connect organizational strategy and the
execution. Program business case is a formal declaration about how program aligns
with the organization strategic objectives.
Program business case and program plan will help to identify business benefits,
outcome, project outputs and
mapping benefits to project and
outcome. Outputs are deliverables
that are tangible by nature,
whereas outcome is the final
results of the proper use of
outputs. Benefits are measurable
improvements that have a positive
impact to organization from the
effect of exploited outcome.
With those above consideration, identification and mapping of benefits, outcome
and project output play important roles for organization to establish alignment
between strategic objectives and projects.