Thinking Strategically as a PM

Posted by Rich Crowley in Project Management, strategy

I once managed a project that involved launching a new product for a financial services company. The initial few weeks of the project were very chaotic.

Product development had not fully defined the specs of the product they wanted to launch which prevented the administration area from fully understanding what it would take to do their jobs once the product was launched. IT needed requirements from both sides before it could provide a meaningful contribution but the product development folks wanted to understand what systems limitations to consider before finalizing the product spec. Sprinkled in were various other challenges like compliance constraints, overlaps with another product launch, summer vacation season and a very tight timeline.

As the PM, I found one of the key contributions I made to this project was ensuring all stakeholders were operating with the same information. Overcommunicating was the risk but it was better than the alternative of having the various areas doing their thing with incorrect information about what the other teams were doing.

I had regular meetings with a group that included the sponsor and the key managers from the affected business units. These were all senior people. In these meetings, I always went in prepared with an agenda of those things that were really hurting us and where I needed these managers to help by influencing their teams in ways I could not.

The result of the project was a successful product launch in spite of the frenetic activity of the project over a 10-12 week period. Towards the end of the project, the sponsor provided feedback to me that although I had done a decent job of managing the project, he didn’t feel I thought strategically enough during the project execution. He felt my meetings with him and his peers focused too much on tactical issues that he didn’t feel were his to resolve.

I’ve thought much about this feedback since but still struggle with this notion. I respect that there is value in getting senior managers engaged at the strategic level within a project and in that respect his assessment was correct. However, I also believe it is equally important for senior stakeholders to work with the PM to help resolve tactical issues that people reporting up through their chain of command aren’t able to resolve on their own.

In subsequent projects, my approach has been to try to deal with such senior people by tying those tactical concerns I have to the strategic objectives the project is trying to accomplish that the sponsor is most concerned about.