Differences Between Strategy Management & Project Management Article

	1888 Articles Home \| Business Articles \| Management Articles \| Online Business Articles	Management RSS
Differences between Strategy Management & Project Management

Many organizations try to use project management to implement a strategy. A strategy usually requires people across an organization to change and align the way they do some things. TASKey has found that strategy management requires breaking the strategy into simple workable action plans that can populate each stakeholder's To Do list.

Author: Dr Neil Miller

Article Tools:

Many organizations try to use project management to implement a strategy. But this is not easy. This article explores why strategy management methods are more effective for implementing strategies than project management methods.

A strategy usually requires people across an organization to change and align the way they do some things, so the whole organization benefits. In most cases, the strategy is identified in broad terms, with the detail to be planned and implemented by the people involved.

Most people want to know explicitly what they have to do to contribute to the strategy, when and with whom. Until they know what they have to do, they have difficulty deciding how any changes affect them.

Project management is a powerful method to drive work towards the achievement of a goal. But it is harder to use for implementing a strategy than for projects that are more local and less dependent on gaining people’s support.

Key issues that project management is not designed to address are:
• The large number of people affected by a strategy
• Existing management structures, cultures and processes that need to be accommodated
• Evolving scope as workflows are defined
• The level of detail that directly tells people what they need to do, when and with whom
• Strategy actions can be overwhelmed by other seemingly more important and urgent actions
• Management needs to be distributed through the people contributing

In broad terms, the differences between strategy management and project management are:
Issue Strategy Management Project Management
Management paradigm Distributed Centralized
Structures & processes Organizational Project specific
Managing the Detail Integrated Ad hoc management of detail
Focus Every stakeholders’ needs Project teams & sponsor’s needs
Workload Distributed Project team driven
Ongoing work Integrated Separated
Coordination Smart software Manual – largely meetings & emails
Progress reporting Based on actual work done Based on estimates
Ongoing sustainment Management continues Management stops when project ends

TASKey has found that strategy management requires breaking the strategy into simple workable action plans that can populate each stakeholder’s To Do list. Then as a stakeholder completes a To Do, plans and progress reporting is updated, and feedback is provided to relevant stakeholders, so they know what is actually happening.
Web and mobile access software called Me2Team handles the complex coordination and feedback required across an organization to implement a strategy effectively. While project management partially addresses some strategy management issues, it is not designed to handle cross organization participation by people doing ongoing work. Visit http://www.taskey.com for more information.

About Author

TASKey provides project management methods and web project management software to get projects done. Our web software makes it easy for everyone doing a project to work together to get the information they need to make the project a success. TASKey provides the most affordable, most flexible and most powerful web project management software available. Visit http://www.taskey.com/

Article Source: http://www.1888articles.com/author-dr-neil-miller-31095.html

Differences between Strategy Management & Project Management