New paper by Alan Stretton offers cohesive model for strategic planning and origins of projects
15 November 2017 – Sydney, Australia – An important new resource has been added to the PM World Library related to strategic planning and project management. The resource is a new paper by Alan Stretton titled “Deliberate and emergent strategies and origins of projects”; it was published in the November edition of the PM World Journal.
According to Alan, “As a broad general observation, writers on project management tend to discuss how projects originate in one of two ways.
- One group tends to focus on projects originating as part of the process of developing strategic portfolios of projects (and/or programs of projects) to help implement organizational strategic business plans.
- The other group tends to see projects originating in more opportunistic or ad hoc ways, with little or no direct involvement in organizational strategic plans – although commonly with a requirement for alignment with the latter.
The first approach links project initiation directly with formal organizational strategic business plans, but the second only indirectly. However, I have found a way of discussing the origins of projects in a single context, rather than in the above two different contexts, via a paper by Mintzberg & Waters 1985. They developed an approach which broadens the concept of organizational strategy, by proposing a continuum of strategies that have deliberate strategies at one pole of the continuum, and emergent strategies at the other. One can directly associate the planned approach of the first bullet point above with deliberate strategies, and the opportunistic or ad hoc approach of the second bullet point with emergent strategies.”
To read this article, visit Alan Stretton’s author showcase in the library at https://pmworldlibrary.net/authors/alan-stretton/, click on the title. Access is free, but you are encouraged to register.