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About the Book
CONNECTING THE DOTS
Aligning Projects with Objectives in Unpredictable Times
by Deloitte Partner Cathleen Benko and Harvard Business School Professor F. Warren McFarlan
While a company's operations deliver for today, its project portfolio drives its future. Project initiatives and related programs, however, have grown faster than most companies' ability to manage them—affecting the return on trillions of dollars of investment while ill preparing companies for today's uncertainty.
As you look for ways to unlock latent shareholder value, restore investor confidence, and adapt to uncertainty, focusing on your organization's project portfolio is a smart place to begin. Why? Because your project portfolio is nothing less than your future currency—the single most important asset available for delivering on your organizational intent. And the best way to leverage this currency is through greater alignment.
Alignment is both a time-honored and topical issue. It is about making sure your project portfolio matches up with your company's objectives and strategies.
Sounds simple enough, but in practice, alignment is hard work. It requires a clear understanding of your objectives: short-term, long-term, and traits. Traits is the term we use to describe the defining characteristics of today's volatile and changing conditions. Although traits may sound unfamiliar, companies are not strangers to the discontinuities of the business environment. Traits simply provide a measurable structure for guiding a response.
Achieving alignment requires mapping your array of project investments against all three sets of objectives. The first diagram below shows an example of a project portfolio that is not aligned. Too many projects are clustered narrowly around short-term objectives. Long-term objectives and trait objectives do not overlap sufficiently. And several projects are not aligned with any objectives. An aspirational view of alignment, in contrast, is shown in the lower diagram.
Alignment of Projects to Organizational Intentions
Aspirational View of Fully Aligned Organization
Put simply, better aligned companies achieve greater investment returns, which is why Chapter 4 of Connecting The Dots offers a no-nonsense 'Alignment Workshop.' The workshop introduces several practical tools that will guide your company through the process of analyzing and aligning your project portfolio. These tools are listed below and are especially well suited for building options in response to today's uncertain business context, showing how companies can use their project portfolios—their currency—as a way to adapt to, rather than to predict, the future.
Suite of Alignment Tools
Connecting The Dots employs a practical, "play the hand you are holding" approach, providing a balance of concepts and roll-up-your-sleeves guidance on how to:
- Determine how well-aligned–or misaligned–your organization is today
- Reveal opportunities for increasing portfolio economics
- Apply tools to reduce portfolio risk while improving its efficiency, flexibility, and direction
- Instill new mind-sets to better respond to whatever future presents itself
If you’re like most executives, you already know your portfolio is not delivering as expected. Alignment is not about spending more; it’s about getting greater return for what you are already spending. This guidebook helps you "connect the dots" between your organization’s intentions and its project activities, capturing hidden value today while better preparing for the future. And it does so in a way you can use when you get into the office tomorrow.
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