Project management as a tool for organisational strategy development : an engineering organisational case study

M.Phil. (Engineering Management)Abstract: The misalignment between the organisational strategic objectives and project objectives leads to strategy failure. Therefore, in the effort of aligning projects to the organisational strategy, in order to realise full benefits of undertaking projects and ensuring the implementation of the organisational strategy through projects, organisations utilise a business case to approve or reject projects which are in support or not in-support of the organisational strategy respectively. A document analysis checklist and semi-structured interviews guide derived from literature, were utilised for collecting data, where four case study projects were selected and six participants were interviewed from the selected organisation. Research findings indicated that the selected organisation does not have business cases or project plans in place for the four cases, which is a misalignment according to literature. Therefore, it is deduced that alignment between the organisational strategy and projects can be realised when the strategic plan is derived from the organisational strategy and utilised to inform the business strategy. The business plan and associated business case are then derived from the business strategy while the business plan and the business case are utilised to inform the project strategy. After that the project plan is derived from the project strategy, is utilised to guide the project execution phase and the anticipated benefits are realised