Project Portfolio Management: Map Your Way To Success

Vice President at Corporate Travel Management N.A., providing vision and executive leadership to the company’s engineering organization.

Black Businesswoman Talking On Cellphone And Using Laptop In Office, Panorama

When setting off on an expedition, a map is essential because it provides directions for reaching the destination. Similarly, leaders cannot complete the growth journey without an outline of their vision and strategy. Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton, the creators of the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) and strategy maps, use the metaphor of troops marching into foreign territory to emphasize the importance of having a detailed map. Without one, a sergeant cannot communicate the strategy to field officers or other troops.

For a company to create or increase business value, everyone in an organization must fully understand its strategy and how to contribute to its success. Value is created not only through profit generation, but also — and more importantly — by leveraging intangible assets to drive organizational efficiency and sustainable growth over time. In this sense, a strategy map shows the big picture as well as the small steps necessary to achieve the goals. It is a simple but effective visual framework that describes how an organization generates value through a chain of time-based cause-and-effect relationships, essentially creating a cascade of successes.

A company’s success often depends on its financial performance, but profits and growth are lagging indicators that can only be achieved by delivering customer valuation propositions through internal processes. To take this a step further, people, technology and culture are the intangibles and sources of continuous learning and innovation that support the strategy and drive all other measures. A strategy map can effectively define the connections between these perspectives and enable organizations to create a balanced strategy that focuses on near-term results and long-term goals.

Aligning Project Portfolios With Organizational Strategies

A strategy map is particularly useful for managing project portfolios that involve various interconnected projects and dependencies. It bridges the gap between strategy design and execution and is essential for promoting focus and clarity, providing perspective to everyone who influences the strategy, and keeping agendas aligned and steps in order.

Strategy usually consists of varying complementary themes. A well-designed strategy map can help determine the right project mix and provide the basis for prioritizing, organizing and evaluating projects within a portfolio. While facilitating a workshop with Global Brand Groups in 2017, I created a simple e-commerce strategy map that aligned technology resources to their strategic themes and cross-divisional goals. From there, we further translated them into executable projects and programs.

Creating a strategy map during the planning process requires companies to clarify their goals and the intermediary objectives needed to accomplish those goals. The map not only serves as a guide, but also reveals gaps in the strategy. By combining a strategy map with the Balanced Scorecard, managers can successfully track benefit realization and make any necessary adjustments.

Creating A Corporate Advantage

Economist Luis Romero describes synergy as “the holy grail of teamwork.” Although the phrase might seem like a cliché, Romero is quite correct. “Synergy” is more than a decades-old business buzzword; even back in 1998, Michael Goold and Andrew Campbell explained that although synergy is attainable, many businesses fail to achieve it due to inflated expectations. Without an in-depth plan, many efforts fail and, instead, destroy value. Goold and Campbell suggested that executives make no assumptions about preexisting notions of synergy; instead, they should allow synergy to emerge through organic business strategies.

How, then, does synergy dovetail with strategy maps? Corporate synergy stems from productive collaboration across teams and divisions. On the company level, a strategy map unites the entire organization by providing a single, comprehensive view. With many groups working on projects of varying sizes and complexity, it is vital to avoid duplication of efforts and ensure that the desired outcome can be achieved effectively through various constituent initiatives. When project teams carry out their assignments, they are not always aware of their work’s impact on others. Aligning all project team members’ diverse perspectives ensures that everyone works toward the same goals and that teams’ objectives build on one another.

Enhancing Workplace Communication

A strategy map also provides a visual representation for how each project in the portfolio contributes to reaching the strategic goals. When displaying the map itself or answering questions in a forum-type assembly, team members can fully comprehend the project’s scope and reach, as well as their roles. Whether a marketing team member or a development lead looks at the map, the direction it offers should be clear.

A strategy map can help teams describe the end goals clearly, identity the risk inherent in the strategy and translate the strategy into operational terms. This helps everyone understand the value creation process. When employees see the impact of their roles, this boosts productivity and morale.

Rarely does a company have an abundance of resources for all of its initiatives, so its ability to prioritize projects and mobilize intangible assets efficiently to execute a strategy can grant it a competitive edge. A strategy map effectively facilitates the creation of a shared vision across business units and aligns an organization’s IT and HR investments with its enterprise strategy. Compared to the traditional weighted scoring model, the strategy map approach is the superior choice when identifying and selecting appropriate projects for a portfolio.