Too often executives use terminology to their advantage to add work
that is contradictory with the trends of reducing spend. The verbiage
is used to cushion and dispel rumours of unnecessary spending. If
changes or new development have to be completed to meet business needs,
should this be labeled as a project or a strategy? Does the label
"strategy" constitute more funding than "project"? Does a defining
strategy override the need to minimize overhead?
It
is important to recognize that strategy embodies a vision that requires
multiple tasks to be accomplished for a common goal. A project is a set
of well-defined tasks that accomplish business requirements and
directives. Many projects are birthed from a strategy but the two are
not interchangeable.
For example, if a company chooses
to build an ODS (operational data store) based on frequent data feeds
from external data sources, there are usually two compelling reasons -
1) reduce overhead of reporting development and maintenance from
different data sources and 2) implement and simplify business
intelligence in a format understandable by sales, marketing, and
operations executives. The project to create the ODS is a very important part of the strategy
of providing visibility and transparency to customers and
cross-departmental executives to increase customer satisfaction and
develop better products/services for its consumers. Now if there is no
unique identifier to relate consumers and products/services across the
ODS, there needs to be a one-time data update to create and amass this
key for reference. This is neither a project nor a strategy but a
one-time assignment and task for a data update for the synchronization
across the ODS to happen successfully.
In essence,
strategy does not equal to project. While strategies are normally
highly funded, projects have to be formed to implement the strategy
accurately. One time tasks that only provide an immediate business need
are not projects and should not be labeled accordingly. Test it out.
What projects are you working on to impact a strategy or fulfill an
immediate business need? The answer defines whether you are a key
component to a greater vision.
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When Projects Are Confused with Strategy
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