Businesses seek to align existing and future projects to long-term organizational goals for the achievement of overall business objectives. This approach of strategic project management can also improve employee performance by aligning an individual’s efforts to the project and the broader organization’s goals.
In this article, we will deep dive into strategic project management, how it improves employee engagement and performance, and how advanced project management software can contribute to improvement initiatives.
What is strategic project management?
Strategic project management is an approach to project and portfolio management that aligns projects with business strategic goals and long-term objectives. The purpose is to increase the likelihood of achieving business objectives with individual contributions from every project while ensuring the project’s success.
While project management focuses on project success at the tactical level, strategic project management focuses on achieving the strategic objectives of an organization.
The rationale behind strategic project management is that without looking at the bigger picture of your business, it is challenging to align projects with strategic goals and ensure each project contributes to the business’s overall objectives.
Statistics confirm the same: 44% of projects fail due to a lack of alignment between the business and the project goals.
How does strategic project management improve employee performance?
Strategic project management improves employee performance by clearly defining and aligning individual efforts to project and organization objectives. It involves prioritizing and choosing projects based on the contribution to the organization’s strategic goals and aligning with the strategic direction. This results in clarity of project objectives, better alignment of projects with organizational long-term vision, and efficient use of company resources.
Here are 9 ways strategic project management improves employee performance:
1. Clearly define how individual goals align with organizational objectives
Strategic project management clearly defines how a project contributes to the overall strategic objectives of the organization. Based on that, you can visualize how an individual effort impacts the achievement of organizational objectives. This enhanced clarity of individual or team contribution to the organization’s success motivates employees to perform better.
2. Clarify expectations with measurable goals
Strategic project management involves breaking a large project into small tasks and subtasks, estimating resource, cost, and time requirements, identifying and setting dependencies, and setting measurable milestones, goals, and OKRs.
With a better understanding of the project roadmap, the employee’s role, responsibilities, and goals, employees have a clear idea of the expectations. Thus, they can better plan their work and make adjustments to increase efficiency and achieve their goals.
3. Enhanced understating of strategic objectives
Strategic project management thrives on continuous collaboration and engagement with stakeholders. This means employees can get direct insights and feedback from stakeholders. It helps project team members develop a better understanding of the organization’s vision and mission and make improvements quickly with direct feedback. This results in improved team performance, reduced rework, and reduced wastage of effort and resources.
4. Bring everyone on the same page
Strategic project management is based on the pillars of transparency, communication, and collaboration. With project information stores in a central location, strategic project management can help improve team collaboration and productivity. Team members can share information seamlessly, develop a shared understanding, have fewer conflicts, and spend less time finding and sharing files, leading to better teamwork.
5. Boost operational efficiency with standardized workflows
Strategic project management involves creating a well-defined project roadmap and workflow for a team to follow. This improves the operational efficiency by streamlining and standardizing operations. Team members are aware of what they need to do, what steps to follow, and who is responsible. Moreover, standardized workflows ensure every step is followed, leading to consistent team operations.
6. Evaluate team performance with progress tracking
Strategic project management involves tracking the project’s progress in real time to ensure a project meets its milestones and deadline. This indirectly helps in improving employee performance. You can track and evaluate a team member’s efforts, identify the areas of improvement, and take steps to make improvements.
7. Manage workload better for optimized resource utilization
Tracking progress helps you identify the bottlenecks early on. You can divert your team resources to remove bottlenecks. This helps you improve team performance by optimal uses of all resources and reducing workload on overworked team members. Therefore, resulting in improved team relationships, a sense of belonging, and a positive employee experience at the workplace. This boosts morale, job satisfaction, and employee well-being for high performance at the workplace.
8. Drive project insights for process and project improvements
Project quality control is a key component of strategic project management. The purpose is to ensure a project meets quality standards as specified. It helps in improving employees’ performance by providing constant feedback on the work. Employees can develop new skills to meet challenging requirements and enhance their existing capabilities.
9. Efficient use of resources
Strategic project management involves prioritizing and choosing projects that add the most value to the organization’s long-term objectives. This helps in improving overall organizational performance by making sure the company resources including humans are allocated to the projects which add the most value.
How does project management software help improve employee performance?
Project management software helps improve employee performance by allowing organizations to implement strategic project management. It provides a platform to set and define strategic goals, align projects and portfolios to overarching goals, and guide individual efforts to achieve broader goals.
With the help of project management software, projects, stakeholders, and teams come to one place for effective collaboration. Here is how you can use project management software to improve employee performance through strategic project management:
- Set organizational objectives: Project management software provides a platform for stakeholders to set SMART strategic goals and define strategic objectives. Based on these goals, selection criteria for accepting, rejecting, or prioritizing the projects can be determined and improve employee performance.
- Create and align projects to strategic goals: Project management software allows you to create projects, define their contribution to strategic goals, set budgets, estimate time, and assign resources to create a detailed project plan. It ensures everyone working on the project is on the same page which helps improve employee performance.
- Facilitate project collaboration: Project management software allows employees to collaborate in a centralized place. It provides features like task management, progress tracking, team communication, document sharing, time tracking, and resource allocation. This can improve employee performance as they manage tasks, documents, and communication in a single place.
- Engage stakeholders: Project management software allows stakeholders to engage directly in projects. It improves project and individual alignment to strategic goals with direct insights, leading to improved organizational performance.
- Data-driven decision-making: Project management software facilitates data-driven decision-making with project reports. Various types of project reports allow one to view and evaluate the project, team, and overall organization’s progress from different angles. This helps in data-driven decisions, prioritizing projects, and redirecting resources to make improvements in performance at all three levels.
Optimize Your Employee Performance with Omni
Businesses can improve employee performance and foster a dynamic and productive work environment with strategic project management. Effective project management not only streamlines processes and delivers results, but also empowers employees to take ownership of their work, develop new skills, and contribute meaningfully to the organization’s success. By investing in project management tools and training, businesses can unlock the full potential of their workforce and achieve sustained growth.
With Omni, you gain access to data-driven insights that empower informed decision-making, as well as seamless integrations that effortlessly connect with your existing employee favored systems, making your entire engagement process more efficient and modern.
Our full suite of modules provide support for every aspect of your business through an intuitive and fully customizable platform that integrates with your team’s favorite tools for a seamless and timely adoption.
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