Essay Example on Organizational Strategy: Path-Goal Relationship for Long-Term Success

Introduction

Organizational strategy refers to a set of actions that a company is intending to put in place to realize long term goals and objectives. Most companies create policies to guide their operations by identifying which of the activities is essential and which ones are not. In other words, organizations utilize various strategic models to indicate their path-goal relationship by directing the employees on the direction of vision and mission statements (Morgese, 2011). This fundamental aim of this study is to adequately explore how projects or activities of an organization can be aligned with the strategies, steer the organization towards profitability or sustainability. In a nutshell, profitability refers to the financial gains or profits made by an organization. At the same time, sustainability defines the company's ability to maintain the operations and human resources available at a steady rate to ensure continuity of the business (Johnson, 2012).

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Aligning Projects with Organizational Strategies to Achieve Profitability

In reality, the strategies that a company intends to follow may sometimes vary with the approach that a company realizes. An organizational strategy usually tends to predict the uncertain position of the company in the future. What happened with most traditional operational projects was that leaders were primarily meant to set up strategies, and then the execution process is left for the organization employees (Tharp, 2007). Scholars acknowledge that there are possibilities that the employees will not understand the proposed strategy the way it is recognized by the leaders who formulated it. Continuing to fund projects and approve activities, and waiting for an overall financial boost at the end of the game, is thus a mystery that is far away from reality ("Project portfolio management: Align project resources with business strategy," 2015).

Moreover, the main aim of most organizations is usually to make a profit. The impendent of misunderstanding between the organizational leaders and the executing team can be solved if the executing squad is meant to ultimately understand the concept of corporate strategy, its key policies, steps, and other components and finally select the appropriate performance measures (Ricardo Pares Arce, 2016). To achieve this, a basic alignment that incorporates strategies and projects must be performed to create a balanced scoreboard, where strategy meets projects and projects coincides with strategy as well. Therefore, an organization should set up the strategic goals clearly, and then develop an advanced systematic approach, that defines the tactics of reaching those goals. In 2009, Walker depicted that this will enable employees to understand and achieve organizational desires and expectations. In the long run, the company will make sales and enjoy maximum income because of the balanced scoreboard between the business strategies and the project management team.

Aligning Projects with Organizational Strategies to Achieve Sustainability

Undoubtedly, project management may prove to be one of the greatest and essential tools for enabling business strategies and, most importantly, creating a sustainable business organization. Meanwhile, project management teams should stop the act of executing a small siloed project as they end up draining the company's resources and productivity. Having noted the meaning of the term sustainability, it can be ultimately derived that blind execution of projects without proper alignment of plans and strategies, makes an organization more unstable and unpredictable.

Imperatively, companies must derive a direct linear relationship between project variables, available resources, time, the workforce to achieve short-term goals. Using a working strategy may make an organization to step-up and face their competitors. In convention, creating a sustainable organization also means that the social, environmental, political, and economic factors are reduced or eradicated. Hunsberger (2008) noted that a sustainable win does not necessarily indicate that the business is making profits. Still, it's the ability to gain stability devoid of the factors in existence, for example, competition.

Also, when the PM and strategies are properly aligned, the company enjoys a massive boost of elevation in terms of clarity of goals, improved state of accountability, and more buy-in consistency (Walters & Laffy, 1996)-getting an established connection between the two leads to a potential high success ration for the cultural cohesion and achievement of long-term goals as well.

References

Hunsberger, K. (2008). Sustainability mandates. PMI Voices on Project Management. Retrieved on July 4, 2011.

Johnson, E. (2012). How others define sustainability. Sustainability in the Chemical Industry, 43-48. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-3834-8_5

Morgese, P. (2011). Integrating global sustainability into project management: The human resource knowledge area. PMI Global Sustainability Community of Practice. Retrieved July 11.

Project portfolio management: Align project resources with business strategy. (2015). The Fast Forward MBA in Project Management, Fifth Edition, 450-461. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119176350.ch20

Ricardo Pares Arce, G. (2016). How to align software projects with business strategy. Software Process Improvement for Small and Medium Enterprises, 258-279. https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-59904-906-9.ch014

Tharp, J. (2007, May). Align project management with organizational strategy. In PMI Global Congress Proceedings, Hong Kong.

Walker, D. H. (2009). Breaking through the projected fog: How smart organizations achieve success by creating, selecting, and executing onstrategy Projects20091

J. Norrie. Cutting through the projected fog: How smart organizations achieve success by building, selecting, and implementing onstrategy projects. Toronto: Wiley, 2008. 245 pp. International Journal of Managing Projects in Business, 2(3), 455-457. https://doi.org/10.1108/17538370910971090

Walters, D., & Laffy, D. (1996). Profitability and productivity: Decision areas. Managing Retail Productivity and Profitability 79-100. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-24621-2_3