Strategic Project Management creates Competitive Edge and Innovation

STRATEGIC PROJECT MANAGEMENT

Strategic Project Management (SPM) involves identification, prioritization and selection of critically important projects that enable an organization to capture and sustain competitive edge. 

SPM is distinctly different from process-driven project management which, whilst important, focuses on procedures, records, tracking, implementation and final delivery.

Competitive edge is defined as being an outcome that:

1. Adds value to customers
2. Is not easily imitated
3. Provides pathways for new possibilities in the future.

Axtrim assists organizations at the strategic level to identify and define projects that will give them this competitive edge.

This is accomplished by developing a true understanding of an organization’s business and objectives so that we can evaluate and demonstrate why a particular project should have a higher priority than another.

INNOVATION

Axtrim’s main point of difference is that it adds innovation to Strategic Project Management.

Past performance has shown that we can enhance the outcomes of projects by looking at them from a range of different angles and in many cases we have also conceived / originated new projects to meet an organization’s strategic objective.

SPM is poorly explained in most project management literature because it is often and incorrectly reduced down to simple financial analysis.

While we maintain a strong financial focus throughout the development of the project brief it is in fact through the innovation that we bring to the table that we create real value.

THE ITERATIVE* PROJECT REVIEW PROCESS

Internally we call our innovation an “iterative process” which means we continually review and assess potential options and outcomes of all the elements of the project throughout the project definition stage until we are satisfied that we have achieved the optimal outcome.
If we presented our approach diagrammatically it would look like the following:

 The iterative (circular) process in the center might go through 2 or 10 cycles before the final, optimal project brief is generated via 'deployment'.

Strategic Project Management provides a different way of prioritizing projects because while some projects may not be as profitable as others if they deliver competitive edge relative to others then they should probably be pursued in preference to those other projects.

For example:  If a company’s competitive edge is ‘first-to-market’ (say, pharmaceuticals) then the projects that enable them to get their product more quickly to market are going to be the most critical ones, even if in their own terms they do not have higher profitability than other potential projects.

*(The Oxford Dictionary defines ‘Iteration’ as the repetition of a process ……… or computational procedure applied to the result of a previous application typically as a means of obtaining successively closer approximations to the solution of a problem)

STRATEGIC PROJECT MANAGEMENT AND THE SERVICES SECTOR

Are there limitations on the use of SPM?

The principles of SPM apply to any industry including service industries.

They are certainly used by all the successful property developers, construction companies and all the major mining companies.

But every industry needs a strategy and a plan for the future and strives to achieve an edge over their competitors and this is what Strategic Project Management is all about.