Linking Project Management and Business Strategy

Linking Project Management and Business Strategy

The technical definition of project management as per the Project Management Institute is “the application of knowledge, skills and techniques to execute projects effectively and efficiently. It’s a strategic competency for organizations, enabling them to tie project results to business goals — and thus, better compete in their markets” (Project Management Institute, 2013). In the modern age of business project management has been adopted by more and more corporations in an effort to spark growth, obtain market share and innovate new products and services in a variety of fields. The usefulness of project management doesn’t stop there, more and more companies are developing in-house project management offices to help the business become more organized and to make the most of all of resources available to the organization. In this vein, project management is used to train employees, smooth and streamline standard operating procedures and implement new tools for organizations. Over the past few decades project management has become essential to any businesses corporate strategy, in this paper we will discuss the benefit of project management in business strategy and display the need for this discipline in all aspects of business.

Project Management is a fairly new idea for businesses, most corporations did not label new endeavors for their company as projects at all, mostly they were simply managed through a research and development department with functional department heads involved as needed to move the specialized assignments along. This caused a great deal of communication issues between departments as there was not a clear designation of whom was in charge of any given assignment. Work packages were often assigned to a number of departments which meant that time was wasted by two departments working on the same task without communicating to each other. Lack of project management also meant that many...