Strategic Project Management: problems, experience

In the face of increasing the global competition of business and following the real practice, significant move was made last decade both by practitioners and theoreticians towards to more close integration of project management with business (or organizational) elements, linking organizational strategy with projects through project portfolio management program management and project management [1,2,3]. Major driver of the move above is the fact that for majority of organizations, both in public and private sectors, projects became basic tool to implement the organizational strategy. Organizational strategy is a start point for the project life and in the present time Organizational Strategic Management in great extends deal with strategic aspects of the projects. One result of this is realizing the fact that in real life the Project Management is divided at least in to parts, which are Strategic Project Management and Operational Project Management and these should be closely integrated. As a rule Strategic Project Management and Operational Project Management are carried out by different groups of managers. Strategic Project Management, generally, is the responsibility of senior managers-sometimes members of executive board, sometimes at some lower level. Operational Project Management is the responsibility of project managers with a traditional understanding of this term as a person responsible for implementation of the projects according with defined deadline, budget, and required quality and to the satisfaction of the key stakeholders. Unfortunately the integration problems between Strategic Project Management and Operational Project Management, both practical and methodological character, still exist and are rather sharp. The paper discusses the points above as well as some best practices to overcome the problems under consideration. The author does not consider the practices, described below, as the only best one. The main reason to choose its is that these practices were used for decades and admits its efficiency within activity of many organizations. Among these International Development Organizations like the World Bank, UNICEF, European Commission, Government Agencies of many developed countries, many large companies.