A friend of mine recently recounted a job interview question when interviewing for a project management position:
"It appears as though you have a lot of strategic planning experience in your background. Why aren't you interviewing for that type of position as opposed to this project management position?"
How would you respond to that question?
I have participated in many strategy development sessions, so the question is very near and dear to my personal experiences. After some reflection, here are my comments.
The Standish Group is well known for a series of Chaos research reports describing reasons for the very high failure rate of software development projects. The three major reasons that a project will succeed are user involvement, executive management support, and a clear statement of requirements. My experience as a project manager is that projects that are not clearly aligned with business objectives start experiencing problems in each of these three areas.
If the users of a system do not understand or buy in to the strategic importance of a new project, they tend to dismiss their participation as not being important. This is especially true if the executive management pays no attention to the project. If a senior executive is constantly talking about some other initiative, that's a signal that this project is not important.
Developing a clear strategic alignment with business value greatly increases the probability a project will be completed on time and within budget. It is an important core project management skill.
Continuous improvement in organizations depend heavily upon teams to learn how to do things better in the future. Without a strategic vision, companies tend to try and improve everything -- across the board. For example, let's improve an old legacy system that is going to be replaced in a few years with a new system.
Understanding what adds value to the Customers of your organization means that some things don't really need to be improved. Why spend time and effort on something the Customer does not want to pay for? Yes, there are always exceptions to the rule. An external Customer may not really care about your Payroll system, but your internal Customers (Employees) care a lot.
Is strategy part of the Project Management Body of Knowledge or Agile Software Development? Absolutely. A project charter needs to have a strong business case for approving the start of a project. The product backlog in an Agile product is continuously reviewed by the Product Owner and prioritized.
Summary
Good Project Managers and Scrum Masters understand the value of making sure projects are aligned with strategy. If no strategy is in place, they often communicate the need to create a strategy -- or they take the initiative to work with the team to develop a clear vision.
