Strategic Thinking: An Efficient Method to take the bull by its horns After expending days in planning, attending hours of meetings, answering hundreds of emails, managing the team and fighting with day-to-day fires, you finally launched the project. Congrats! Now, you are expecting the winning results.
In the past, the project success is considered as the project completed before the deadline and within the budget. Now, it’s about syncing the project management with organizational strategy amid of operational decision-making and tactical leadership. Alas! Most of the project managers are found saying “We have always done it.” The problem lies in this thinking is that they work on ‘What’ part and ‘How’ part is least focused where the essence of strategic thinking lies. It indicates the project management is disconnected from the strategy and thereby the gap between the lofty ambitions of project manager and the staff completing the work cannot be fulfilled. Before we get into it, let’s dig deep into the lacklustre vocabulary STRATEGIC THINKING: Strategic thinking is a fundamental driver of the company which opens up the new opportunities with provocative dialog, strategic planning, and broader perspective. It is regarded as the advanced version of business planning that aims to communicate the vision to staff, apt analyzation of the resources, best prioritization of the tasks, and the creation of an executable action plan and get the project done with higher efficiency.
Let’s take a look how laying the foundation of strategic thinking within projects creates a difference: CLARIFY THE PRIORITIES For sure, working in a big organization means you are managing multiple projects simultaneously; the need to manage the priorities among the projects has been ever present. In the case, the priorities are not defined means you don’t know where to aim and probably not end up doing what you want to accomplish. NCREASE PROJECT COMMUNICATION The strategic thinking that starts with project planning flows from top to bottom and back to forth of the project. Sometimes, the project managers fail to keep the project strategy in rhythm with the organizational strategy because of the poor communication among the team. Here, the project manager is accountable to share the strategic plan and vision for the project with the complete team. ENSURE CONSISTENT TEAM ENGAGEMENT The strategic thinking has long-term impact and results when collective competency occurs throughout the organization. The collective competency comes when the project manager design a strategic plan wherein every team member is engaged and make their notable contribution throughout the project development. REDUCE RESOURCE MISALLOCATION Without resources, the project is like another unread PDF file. It holds no weight, whether you are tempted to complete an interesting project first or not because the allocation of the proper resources to the projects as per the project priorities is vital.
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