The Strategy Gap: How to align Projects with Operations

In countless executive meetings, we craft visionary strategies: bold market expansions, disruptive innovations, and ambitious digital transformations. We spend hours refining these plans, believing they are the blueprint for our future. Yet, when we look at how most organizations are structured, funded, and rewarded, a clear disconnect emerges. We are often managing our teams, our budgets, and our careers based on the operational metrics of yesterday, not the strategic imperatives of tomorrow.

This isn't just an oversight; it's a critical "strategy gap" that's costing organizations relevance and growth. The questions is how to align running the business with changing the business or how to align projects with operations.

The Reality: Operations Keep You in the Game, Projects Win the Game

For decades, the dominant paradigm for value creation was clear: optimize operations. Get faster, leaner, more efficient. While operational excellence remains vital for maintaining profitability and delivering consistent customer experiences, its capacity to drive new value – to create competitive advantage and future-proof the business – is rapidly diminishing.

If you dissect where true, transformative value is being created in successful companies today, it rarely comes from a 5% improvement in processing invoices. Instead, it stems from a concentrated number of critical projects that fundamentally reshape the organization's capabilities, market position, or entire business model.

Think about it:

• New Platform Launches: Creating entirely new digital ecosystems that unlock fresh revenue streams.

• Aggressive Market Entries: Successfully penetrating new geographies or customer segments.

• Digital Reinventions: Overhauling core technology and processes to become a truly agile, data-driven entity.

• Strategic Restructurings: Realigning resources and capabilities to seize emerging opportunities.

  
  

These aren't merely tasks on a to-do list; they are deliberate, time-bound bets on your company's future. They are the engines of strategy, not just its byproduct.

Why Projects Are Fundamentally Different (and Demand a New Approach)

Operational work is about predictability, efficiency, and continuous improvement within established boundaries. Projects, especially strategic ones, are about change, uncertainty, innovation, and breaking new ground. They require:

1. Different Governance: Traditional governance often prioritizes steady-state KPIs. Strategic projects need flexible, adaptive oversight that focuses on milestones, learning, and outcomes, not just cost containment.

2. Different Talent and Leadership: While operational leaders excel at optimization, strategic projects demand leaders who can navigate ambiguity, build cross-functional teams, manage risk, and inspire innovation. It's less about sustaining and more about pioneering.

3. Different Funding Models: Projects are investments in future capability, not just expenses. They need capital allocated based on strategic potential and risk, with clear return expectations, rather than being squeezed into annual operational budgets.

4. A Different Mindset: The focus shifts from "how do we do this better?" to "what new thing do we need to build?" and "how do we adapt to learn along the way?"

Project Approach

The CEO's Mandate: Aligning Ambition with Action

To bridge the strategy gap, leaders must stop treating major projects as "side of desk" activities, or worse, as distractions from the "real work." These initiatives are not secondary; they are the real work of building the future.

Here’s how CEOs and executive teams can make this critical shift:

• Elevate Projects to Strategic Priority: Explicitly recognize that strategic projects are the primary vehicle for executing strategy. They should be at the forefront of executive discussions, resource allocation, and performance reviews.

• Invest in Project Leadership: Develop or acquire leaders with the unique skills needed to manage complex, strategic initiatives. These are not merely project managers; they are strategic execution architects.

• Rethink Your Org Structure & Governance: Move towards a model that supports project-centric execution. This might mean cross-functional teams with direct senior sponsorship, clear decision-making frameworks for projects, and a governance structure that champions progress over process.

• Align Incentives with Strategic Outcomes: Reward successful strategic project execution, not just operational efficiency. If bonuses are solely tied to quarterly P&L, you incentivize short-term thinking over long-term strategic building.

• Foster a Culture of Learning and Adaptability: Strategic projects involve risk and often require pivoting. Create an environment where experimentation, learning from failure, and adapting the plan are encouraged, not punished.

  
  

Conclusion: How to align Projects with Operations

In an era of relentless change, clinging to an operations-first mindset is a recipe for stagnation. The companies that will thrive are those where strategy isn't just a destination, but a journey actively undertaken through a portfolio of impactful, well-executed projects. It's time to redefine value creation and empower your organization to not just run the business, but truly change it