From Experience : Linking Projects to Strategy

1) From Experience : Linking Projects to Strategy

1. Successful projects are so important to Hewlett Packard because its growth is typically dependent on the implementation of such projects. These projects generate new products, services, or procedures. Conversely, projects that fail results in expenses, wastage of resources, time, and frustration. The management team at Hewlett Packard are increasingly concerned about getting good results from their projects in order to spur growth in their organizations and also get better cross-organizational cooperation. In an effort to achieve this, the company paid a lot of attention to the process of selecting successful projects. Hewlett Packard monitors its projects and ensures that it is relevant to its strategic goals because it knows that projects that are not well aligned with the organization's strategic goals are bound for failure. It knows that successful projects add to the top line (revenue) which ultimately translates to the bottom line (profit). These projects also result in increased efficiency and helps the organization to achieve its goals within specified time and on budgets. Projects can make or break an organization future. It also realized that successful projects serve as a learning platform through which the organization can acquire a lot of experience for the implementation of future projects.

2. In quantifying project contribution to the firm's mission or goals, organizations can go as far as the data available will allow it. The screening process is a two-dimensional view having the criteria complexity on the horizontal axis and number of screens, the depth. So in other words, the team can continue to narrow down on the projects until the remaining projects are approachable for analysis.

The rigorous project selection process that HP has results in reducing the number of projects to a smaller size that makes it more manageable, and ultimately results in higher productivity. They also diversify in their project selection in the sense that they settle for a combination of platform, derivative, breakthrough and partnership projects. In addition, they even venture into "Option" projects where they make some investment and investigate possibilities. They also don't exhaust all of their band width and leave a little room to take advantage of unexpected opportunities to deal with when they arise. As finace teaches us, diversification reduces ones level of risk to exposure. In the same way, HP ends up reeaping the benefits that comes through diversification

3. HP pays considerable attention to the measure it uses to to evaluate its projects to simplify the selection process. The simplification enables them to access each project carefully in an objective manner. This ultimately results in selecting projects that will be successful. In addition, it gives them the ability to compare project to