How to Choose Strategic Projects

 

We’re talking strategy. If you don’t already have a really good strategy, this series will equip you with the questions to guide your own strategic planning process. No MBA required. You don’t even have to wear a suit. This is the final stage of strategic planning: identifying the projects that will help you move forward.

What Are the Tactics after Setting Your Strategy?

In our previous discussion, we focused on the most important step: setting your strategy by defining your strategic imperatives—those guiding principles and insights you have about how your business needs to be different from what it is today. Now, let’s talk about what comes next: the tactics.

We often see organizations that have their four strategic imperatives and then, for each strategy, they ask, “What are the five tactics we’re going to employ for this strategy?” The problem, of course, is that if you take a strategy with maybe four strategic imperatives and you have five projects for each of them, all of a sudden you’re juggling 20 different strategic projects. That really dilutes your organization’s energy and resources across far too many fronts.

Coming up with Strategic Projects

I have a different approach when coming up with strategic projects. What I do is take each of the strategic imperatives and ask, “What are some of the things we could do that would really move us forward on this imperative?”

For example, last time we talked about how being “global enough” was a really valuable strategic imperative for a company that needed to expand beyond the United States, but not spread itself so thin across so many countries that it couldn’t afford to keep up.

You might say, “Okay, what could we do to really try to move the needle on being ‘global enough’?” For that company, there was one answer that was immediately apparent: “We absolutely need to establish a base in the United Kingdom. The most obvious place where our customers are going—where we need to be able to grow with them—is the UK.”

That means a number of things: A UK strategy is going to require a different data center. It’s going to require building a sales force there. It’s going to require reprogramming your software with a lot of U’s and S’s in words where you wouldn’t normally have them. There’s a whole cluster of things that make this big strategic project around the beachhead in the UK. That’s all one big project.

Projects That Advance Strategic Imperatives

But your approach shouldn’t stop at examining each imperative to come up with your proposed projects. The real value is in looking at all of them and seeing if there are single projects or programs that can really advance you on multiple imperatives at the same time. That’s where you’re getting into the good stuff. Imagine a single activity that is so useful because it pushes you on multiple things. A “big bet” project that advances not one, but two, three of your strategies.

Many years ago, I worked with a state lottery and gaming organization. They had imperatives around needing to be more entertaining because they were losing to places like Atlantic City and Las Vegas. But as a state-run organization, the last thing they wanted was to keep getting more and more money from the same people and end up with them gambling away their rent.

They were looking at how they could diversify. There were a number of things they wanted to do, and one really valuable approach was to move into internet gaming. On the internet, they could reach a whole new customer base, they could make it fun and entertaining, and there were so many different platforms they could use. At the same time, because it required login credentials, people could opt-in to be locked out, or set limits on how much they could gamble on any given day. Being on a digital platform gave them a lot of control that would have been much harder to have in a brick-and-mortar casino or when you’re just buying a lottery ticket.

Focus on Big Bets to Move Ahead

Getting into internet gaming was the sort of big bet project that we’re looking for. An idea that is so valuable because implementing it will help us move ahead on many of our strategic imperatives.

When you’re creating your strategic projects, don’t just scattershot a whole bunch of things. You can’t just say, “These are our 27 priorities!”—because first, your organization can’t afford to do that, and second, you’ll burn everyone out trying to do it. Instead, focus on a small number of key initiatives. Think about the six, eight, at most ten big bets that your organization can make to move you ahead on multiple imperatives. That’s why they’re useful. That’s why they matter.

These Projects Are Not Your Strategy

The most important thing to remember, however, is that these projects are NOT your strategy. Don’t talk about them as if they’re your strategy. They should be called what they are: “These are our projects.” “These are our big bets.” “These are our tactics.” Whatever you prefer. But never lose sight of the fact that the strategic imperatives are the strategy. They’re the guiding principles that everyone in your organization should follow.

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In our next and final installment in this series, we’ll explore how to effectively cascade your strategy throughout your organization. The idea is to make sure you don’t lose people by getting stuck at the project level, but instead, keep everyone aligned with the strategic imperatives at the heart of your plan.

More On This

Tips for Setting Strategic Goals

Common Mistakes in Strategic Planning

How Does Strategic Planning Benefit Companies?

Video: 1 Yes and 3 Less – A Different Way to Look at Prioritization

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