Getting just one large or high-visibility project over the finish line is a significant achievement. Executives and C-suite members are often managing several strategic projects in progress at any given time, and orchestrating activities across all of them can be a big challenge. Senior staff must be ready to adapt to changes in the business environment and coordinate with cross-functional teams to implement course corrections quickly and effectively.
To help senior leaders maintain awareness of their projects’ health and schedule alignment with each effort’s target completion date, we compiled some core steps to streamline organizing, orchestrating, and overseeing multiple strategic projects simultaneously.
Conduct regular reviews of both project and portfolio health
One key to orchestrating several concurrent projects is ensuring you have adequate visibility into each initiative plus a comprehensive understanding of how all projects are performing when assessed together. Regular review sessions allow the senior staff and other stakeholders to evaluate the status of discrete projects and to place those in context with the health of the organization’s overall portfolio.
Reviews are also a prime opportunity to assess project alignment with strategic objectives and ensure everything remains on track for success. These sessions can be as detailed or as cursory as necessary to deliver the right level of insight, and each discussion can flex to fit the current level of need. Reviews may include:
- Overview of progress against defined milestones and other achievables
- Resource allocation assessments to ensure ongoing efficiency and effectiveness
- Explore emerging risk areas and mitigation efforts
The interconnections between individual strategic initiatives represent critically important areas where handoffs may occur, elements could potentially drop off the radar without being noticed, and delays might crop up due to communication gaps or other issues. Reviews that encompass project-level detail in concert with portfolio-level oversight enable executives to maintain broad awareness and to respond to problems early.
Establish a prioritization framework for all projects
Monitoring multiple strategic projects that are in different stages of development is tricky. Some may be in the early planning phase, with ample opportunity to adjust activities as needed. Others, however, are likely in the late stages of execution, when there’s little time left to find and fix problems without incurring significant last-minute expenditures or missing key milestone. Having a clear, structured approach to assign and maintain priorities allows executives to understand and handle competing demands with varying levels of urgency across multiple projects.
The team may need to modify resource allocations, for example, based on issues that exist in other strategic initiatives. Developing clear criteria for each priority level provides consistency and helps to streamline the decision-making process, particularly when project timelines are tight. This same standardized process can be applied to evaluate both new requests and emerging issues against existing commitments, dependencies, capabilities, and business impacts.
Maintain stakeholder engagement
Many strategic initiatives have long timelines. Some stakeholders may experience slow periods as different stages of the project lifecycle require less of their attention or their functional group’s resources. Ensuring participants remain engaged and committed to the project’s success becomes critically important as new projects or even daily duties may come to the forefront and occupy their focus. Consider establishing regular touch points with influential stakeholders to help spread engagement efforts from the top down. These may coincide with the team’s regular project and portfolio review sessions, or they might be distinct interactions.
Because initiatives can quickly fall apart if everyone isn’t ready to go when their next activities are scheduled to begin, executives should use their unique position to ensure stakeholder commitment remains high and that the proper attention is directed at the highest priority efforts.
PMAlliance, Inc uses a team of highly experienced and certified professionals to provide project management consulting, project management training and project portfolio management.