Managing the Achievement of Strategic Organizational Goals through Projects: Understanding the Role of Management Practices

Developing organisational strategies and achieving set goals is one of the most researched and taught topics in business today. Although management disciplines such as project management are often quoted as important means of implementing and realizing organizational strategies through enabling the realization of successful projects, there is considerable confusion in organizational literature on how this happens. Grounded upon a questionnaire based survey of 456 managers and using component-based structural equation modelling technique, we find that portfolio management (PPM) and benefits management practices enable an organisation to achieve planned strategic goals. While portfolio management does this directly, benefits management achieves this indirectly by reinforcing PPM with the assurance that planned project benefits will be delivered. Furthermore, we find that alignment of Business and IT increases the effectiveness and maturity of the management concepts. We also find that in order to develop mature benefits management practices organizations need to be committed to declaring benefits management as a strategically important discipline and investing relevant resources in the adoption and diffusion of the practices throughout the organization.