Portfolio Management PPM

Strategic prioritization: Align projects with key goals

You can’t approve every new idea or project that crosses your desk, no matter how enticing. Each initiative consumes limited time, energy, and resources, so you must determine whether its organizational benefits outweigh its costs.

Strategic prioritization allows you to answer that question, pinpointing projects and tasks that best align with the company’s vision and contribute to its goals and objectives. Here are all the tools to ensure your work advances the organization’s strategic goals and objectives. 

What is strategic prioritization?

Strategic prioritization identifies important initiatives and decides which to pursue according to their potential corporate value. Importance is assessed based on a project’s outcomes and how they align and contribute to the business’s strategic objectives. 

To prioritize strategic initiatives, leaders must evaluate current market dynamics and the competitive landscape, then weigh the impact and feasibility of one project against another. This process produces a list of priorities that inform management’s decision-making regarding resource allocation, risk, funding, and other project considerations. 

Benefits of strategic prioritization

Strategic planning allows an organization to view the big picture and maximize the impact of its choices. With a systematic prioritization process in place, the following tasks are simplified:

Identify key undertakings

Weighing priorities according to impact reveals the initiatives that contribute the most value to strategic objectives. The company can focus its resources on completing those projects ahead of everything else.

Address problems

Crises will inevitably occur; strategic prioritization tells you when to put aside other tasks to address them. Knowing where an issue falls on your list of priorities helps determine whether you should immediately work on the issue, complete more pressing tasks first, or delegate the responsibility to someone else.

Clarify important vs. urgent

Some tasks are urgent, and others are important. Knowing the difference helps you address each. Important work aligns with long-term objectives and produces significant results, whereas urgent tasks require immediate attention. Strategic prioritization provides a structure to weigh urgency against importance so you can set strategic deadlines without compromising the delivery of other, higher-priority items.

Resolve conflict

A strategic framework for prioritizing initiatives lets management avoid guesswork and avoid bias. A formal decision-making process allows management to do the following:

• Impartially allocate resources and budgets to high-priority initiatives

• Determine when teams can take on additional tasks and how to adjust schedules

• Draft emergency override standards outlining when and why an urgent issue should take priority over another task

Build alignment

Clear priorities put stakeholders on the same page, aligning their collective efforts to generate maximum productivity. 

Mastering decision-making and strategy

The easiest way to prioritize projects, objectives, and goals is to establish a structured evaluation process. Here’s how:

1. Identify strategic goals

Consult the organization’s vision and value statements to develop objectives for the next three to five years. These long-term strategic goals could include:

• Financial goals: Increase total revenue by 10% in the next three years and 15% in the next five.

• Operational goals: Decrease the percentage of returned goods by 2% annually over the next three years.

• Customer-based goals: Increase market share to 12% within five years.

• Internal goals: Increase the yearly PTO usage rate from 65% of days allocated to 85% within four years.

2. Evaluate strategies

Once you’ve finalized the list of organizational goals, assess proposed projects and initiatives to determine their contribution to each. In addition, consider these factors:

• Expected impact

• Potential risks

• Market trends

• Customer needs

• Staff capacity

• Required resources

• Feasibility

Based on this evaluation, rank the project list in order of priority, fast-tracking those that deliver the most valuable outcomes.

3. Implement prioritization

Start crossing items off your priority list by assigning the top projects to various working groups with clear expectations. These teams are responsible for developing a detailed project plan outlining the steps, timelines, and resources needed for a successful execution.

4. Review and refine

Vision and goals evolve. Typically, a company reviews and updates corporate goals annually – sometimes more often, depending on the industry. Strategic priorities should change alongside objectives, ensuring each team’s efforts continue to advance the organization’s aims. 

How to leverage strategic prioritization 

Once you’ve established strategic priorities, how do you use them? Here are a few scenarios for applying this framework:

Competing priorities

Multitasking often leads to poor execution and outcomes. When two initiatives with seemingly identical impacts come across your desk, strategic prioritization establishes a structure to evaluate the projects on an equal footing. You can assess strategic implications by comparing resource allocation, impact, feasibility, and other criteria. Prioritization insights allow you to choose the project that delivers an improved return on investment and advances organizational goals.

Shifting market trends

Dynamic economic factors can wreak havoc on strategic planning. Strategic priorities must adapt when this happens, and to suit the new environment.

But what about ongoing projects? Updating strategic goals doesn’t mean giving up on work in progress. Instead, new strategic priorities provide a framework for adjusting timelines or resource allocation to adapt current project outcomes to better suit new organizational objectives. Flexibility allows the company to pivot, avoid starting from scratch on new initiatives, and prevent a significant financial loss.

Communication between teams

Strategic prioritization provides a clear framework for productive discussions of thorny issues, such as resourcing, staffing, or funding and improving team’s decision-making processes. It also offers visibility, tying individual work contributions to organizational goals and success. Together, these align teams and stakeholders behind the organization’s long-term goals and motivate them to perform at their peak.

Challenges in strategic prioritization

Obstacles to effective include a lack of clarity, competing priorities, and limited resources. Poorly defined strategic goals are the most significant issue, often contributing to the other two roadblocks. 

Define goals according to the SMART framework to refine your direction and prevent misunderstandings.

• Specific: Describe the goal in precise terms

• Measurable: Provide metrics that define success

• Achievable: Verify the goal is attainable with the available capacity and resources

• Relevant: Ensure the objective contributes to corporate values and vision

• Time-bound: Establish a timeline for completion

Clear organizational goals highlight which priorities to pursue, directing resources and efforts in the right direction.

Measuring the success of your strategic prioritization

Leaders need formalized metrics to gauge the success of organizational prioritization. The following key performance indicators (KPIs) provide valuable insight into the performance of strategic priorities:

• Revenue growth

• Return on investment (ROI)

• Customer satisfaction

• Market share

When choosing KPIs, avoid vanity metrics that make the team look good. Focus instead on measurements that provide meaningful qualitative and quantitative data. 

For example, imagine a developer is trying to determine which initiatives to prioritize as part of a website’s performance improvement strategy. Web traffic is often a vanity metric, whereas time spent on a site or product page conversion rates provide valuable and actionable insights. These data points drive informed decision-making.

If prioritization isn’t delivering the expected outcomes, that doesn’t mean the. It may simply need adjustment. Leadership and stakeholders must step in, evaluate the situation, and adjust their tactics to ensure success. 

Strategic prioritization made easy with Tempo

Strategic planning and prioritization require a nimble mindset and a bird’s eye view of every factor contributing to organizational goals and objectives. You need a tool that summarizes all your organization’s strategic initiatives to ensure you focus your team’s efforts in the right direction. 

Tempo’s is a project management solution that allows you to predict, adapt, and deliver prioritized projects that advance company goals, no matter how complex your portfolio. Using real-time scenario modeling, Portfolio Manager can adjust plans, level workloads, and update scheduling whenever priorities change. 

Try Portfolio Manager today to simplify your strategic prioritization process.