Project Management in Strategy

The role of the project management team in strategy can not be underestimated. Whoever owns the process of bringing people together and when they do their work, is a key player in how well strategy is created and modified  across the life-cycle of a project.

For example, PMs are often making calls about how deliverables are handled between teams. 

In this way they determine when one team's work begins to influence another. For example, when does the designer begin design? When the information architecture doc is fully completed or does it start earlier - when key concepts have been settled on but execution by the IA is still pending? The timing of this will have a huge impact on how well a product meets the needs of a business and users. Its impact can be as large as work by the official strategist in the discovery/define phase.

Over and over I have seen that while each discipline has very strong ideas about when they would prefer to start their work, it is up to the project management team to pull the trigger and not them.

Too often though I see methodologies that have gone fallow. A team accepts that there are blunt hand-offs of final deliverables from one "Phase" to the next. Or worse, methodology is quickly in ruins after the Discovery Phase and process is replaced by a full out sprint to the finish.

I'm being critical of the 4D methodology, I know. I don't mean to hammer on anyone's fingers but the idea that a project clicks from Define, to Design, then Development to Deployment in the interactive space is something to hold on to very lightly. In the 4D framework the UX team completes their work and hands it to design and then design to development and on down the line. The distinct break between Design and Development especially has created a lot of failures.

Someone has to put the breaks on the 4D methodology and take it upon themselves to look at every point in the methodology from a strategic vantage. 

But who?  

Project management is identified with methodology but PMs aren't seen to have a role in strategy. This is a huge misunderstanding of the PM's role. As a result no one is identified to stand up and own the entire project methodology from a strategic stand point.  

Which needs to be questioned.

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Here is an example of a methodology where the hand-offs are NOT blunt hand-offs of final deliverables from one "Phase" to the next. Transitions are smoother. 

I designed this methodology for an ecommerce studio to allow for deeper strategic thinking. We were also having huge cost overruns. This was built to partly stop that.  

In this methodology, teams begin their strategic documentation when the team they have a dependency on are moving into execution. There is no choppy lurching from Define to Design to Development Phase. 

In many respects this is a phaseless methodology.

The bottom line is this:

Excluding PMs from the strategy table at an agency inevitably kills strategic thinking off in the UX phase and often leads, if nothing else, to budget over-runs and lost opportunities.