Which Projects best align with my corporate strategy?

This month I will be presenting at the PMI dinner in the PMI Southern Alberta Chapter Dinner Meeting on October 25-th. It is a great topic and probably of interest to most PMOs and to executives who plan strategy.

The title is: "Aligning & prioritizing projects with the corporate strategy using Balanced ScoreCards".


I personally got very interested in this topic when I was reading the CIO Insight Research Study on Project Management, 2004. The study highlights some very interesting points as mentioned below:

1. 53% of the CIO's say that their project prioritization is politically driven;
2. Only 68% agree that all the necessary business and IT stakeholders are involved in setting IT project priorities;
3. Only 40% of the CIOs say that their companies use a portfolio management approach;

This is when time I started questioning myself on how best can you align your projects with corporate strategy so that the project portfolios can be driven and managed by the needs of the organization..... This was also the time when I actually understood how a true business case is created by using a company's real financial data like working cost of capital and market debt to equity ratio. There was definitely a need to measure projects and question if it was worth doing a project.

At that time, I had recently learned about Balanced Score Cards from an assignment at an Airlines company in Canada and also created some models using Mathematical Optimization under the guidance of my Master's thesis supervisor. The combination of these two led to the creation of the approach which I plan to present.

I was implementing this at Siemens last year and got a great opportunity to understand various types of businesses Siemens is involved in. I wish to share this experience with all of you.

I will post my presentation here on the blog as well and an the Excel Sheet where I built the model.