The majority of executives agree about the relevance of strategy implementation despite the fact that most of them struggle with transition from ‘conception to birth’. PMI’s 2014 Pulse of the Profession research revealed that organizations’ actual state were far from the conditions necessary for success. Companies were suffering an average loss of US$109 million to every US$1 billion spent on their projects, or nearly 11%. PMI believes there are significant opportunities for project management offices (and strategy officers) to add value.

The majority of organizations reported that their projects/programs were not aligned with their organizational strategy. This is unfortunate as this is a requirement for companies to increase their overall success rates. Only 32% of the organizations have worked on this alignment issue when comparing last year’s PMI research. This alignment issue has been identified as the main contributor to the high percentage of unsuccessful strategic initiatives. Of companies with high project-strategic initiative alignment, 65% reportedly have success compared with 35% success rate with the opposite, and lack of alignment results in a less agile organization.

With the rate of change in today’s markets, the more agile businesses stand to be the most successful. This agility enables them to change and adapt to changes more quickly.  Thus, it should be self-evident that the need to improve strategy, project alignment and agility of businesses serve to improve the businesses’ success rates.

Companies with these traits usually tend to be the high-performing organizations and they focus on:

1)      The talent management through ongoing training to develop high performers. Executive participation is important to fuel this initiative.

2)      Strengthening their processes.

3)      Outcomes of the projects and programs to ensure that the project/program result in the desired results.

By PMI’s Pulse of the Professional, February 2014 http://www.pmi.org/Knowledge-Center/Pulse.aspx