Published in the November 2006 Edition of Canadian Government Executive
by Garry Koop

It’s a common misconception that the public sector lags behind private sector organizations when it comes to project management capabilities. In reality governments have made great strides in establishing their strength in project management thanks to important life lessons – sharing and collaboration.

Political and economic drivers now push the public sector, especially provincial governments, away from a policy-based and process-focused approach to projects, to one focused on strategy and driven by results. Consider how provincial governments are approaching today’s healthcare challenges – approximately half of provincial governments’ budgets go towards healthcare, with the health portfolio filled almost entirely with outcome mandates, such as shorter wait times.

In recent years provincial governments have begun to master the art of project management by establishing forums for sharing project management tools and skill horizontally across government departments. These forums often combine the expertise from within government departments with best practices from third-party organizations, like the Project Management Institute and other resources.

This cross-pollination of ideas is an essential ingredient to any project’s success, and is part of a growing trend that leads to achieving project management success across all aspects of government. But this type of collaboration is particularly important when one considers the project management expertise within an IT organization.

Why? In both public and private sectors, the IT group is often at the forefront of project management capabilities. Project management, in its truest form, is associated with delivery, and IT departments have driven the greatest amount of project execution in recent years.

As governments move to this new paradigm of outcome versus policy, decisions regarding which projects get the go-ahead are still made by government ministries, albeit with more input solicited from those who will execute the project, such as IT.

This leads to a public sector that is becoming more flexible and more cohesive, creating new efficiencies via:

• Increased awareness of tools and resources in place for project portfolio management
• A more efficient project management structure through the established forums and government’s willingness to look to outside  expertise
• Government ministries and different IT clusters working together more collaboratively.

Still, as successful as governments are at project execution, there remains some way to go to truly herald a new era in public sector project management. Today’s outcome-oriented project environment demands a greater focus on linking execution to strategy than ever before. This is not to suggest a move back to old school strategic planning that leads to a huge ‘strategy’ binder collecting dust on a shelf. As Arie de Geus observes in The Living Company, strategy needs to be something you do, not something you have.

Government executives who excel at project management recognize a few key success factors:

Good strategy and good execution are linked – and drive outcomes: Surprisingly, this is a shift in thinking for some public sector organizations, where projects have often been driven by policy, with more of an eye on process and less on outcomes. Strategy needs to be more agile, enabling organizations to make intelligent business decisions. More flexibility is needed. Government executives can’t be married to a plan and must be prepared to change. Internal and external mechanisms to identify leading change indicators are needed to proactively develop a strategy and execute it.

Strategic statements need to be articulated with specific outcomes in mind and accompanied by a measurement methodology. Whether you are using a Balanced Score Card or another approach, it is important to establish your strategy and disseminate it to the organization’s senior management to have proper business alignment. This will be difficult and you can expect pushback. But it is absolutely worth doing. The proof lies in the benefits gained by the many private sector companies already doing it today.

Portfolio management bridges the gap between strategy and execution: You have to work with a full view in mind. Project portfolio management (PPM) acts as the framework that connects strategy and projects with bi-directional communications and management. Look at it as a translation stage or intelligent middleware. It takes the strategies, their measures and provides the process for your organization to select, monitor and report on all initiatives. It gives visibility into all undertakings and allows you to understand the impact on the entire business, supplying you with the knowledge to make better decisions. PPM offers the solid bridge between strategy and execution and allows for intelligent business decision-making.

Execution is as important as strategy formulation: A strategy is only as good or as bad as its execution. Bossidy and Charan, in their book Execution, state that execution is the great-unaddressed issue in the business world today. The same can be said of the public sector. Its absence is the single biggest obstacle to success and the cause of most of the disappointments that are mistakenly attributed to other causes.

Many executives in both sectors delegate execution to others believing it to be tactical; however, leaders must be deeply engaged. As with agile strategies that are more than road maps, execution is a discipline and a system – one that is built into an organization’s strategy, goals and culture. Strategic project management is a key to ensuring successful execution that is measured against strategic targets.

To successfully execute, organizations need to:

• Value the importance of leadership: You need someone who has done this before in the public sector, such as a highly experienced and seasoned project management professional who knows how to lead large complex and mission-critical initiatives. By being dedicated to just this initiative, issues associated with internal alliances, or bias to any technologies involved, are avoided.
• Focus on strategy and position it correctly: Always keep in mind the underlying business objectives and don’t become blinded by bias toward a specific tool. Make sure it is measurable and aligned, properly resourced and supported within the organization. This includes executive involvement through sponsorship with sufficient authority and accountability.
• Establish organizational structures and support: Ensure you have a culture of project management, and the necessary support and staff in place, as well as the disciplines and processes needed to lead and manage the project’s progress, its risks and the issues that will crop up throughout the life of the project.
• Communicate frequently: Ensure that everyone is properly prepared and kept apprised of the project’s demands.

A strategic approach to project management ensures doing the right projects and doing them right. It helps eliminate the outrageous burdens associated with failed and challenged projects. Stakeholders, at each level, need to be involved in all stages from strategic development to execution. When government executives consider the generally low success rate of taking strategy to execution, they cannot afford to be anything less than strategic with their approach to project management. Our future successes depend on it.

Garry Koop is vice president of relationship management for SPM Group. An author and well-known speaker, he has over 15 years of experience in various levels of government and industry, including finance, technology, telecommunications, legal, brokerage, insurance, and logistics.