Leverage Your Organization’s DNA to Prioritize and Align Your Projects

This article includes editions tailored for government agencies, nonprofits, and private businesses. Choose your edition below or continue reading the cross-sector overview.

I regularly meet with clients who express frustration with “too many projects competing for too few resources.” Organizations of every type struggle with annual budget and planning processes that often start with currently funded projects and decisions shaped by “argument by vigorous assertion” or by whoever has the strongest voice in the room.

There is a better way.

Instead of starting with what you are already doing, start with your organization’s DNA. When you start with your organizational DNA, you choose and prioritize projects that directly support your strategy. A focus on organizational DNA sharpens strategic goals, identifies strategic performance measures, strengthens project tracking, focuses corrective actions where needed, and improves alignment of people, processes, technology, and budgets to strategy and goals.

What is Organizational DNA?

By “organizational DNA,” I mean the strategic objectives that describe the organization’s strategy. Just like human DNA, each organization’s strategy is unique. These powerful building blocks of uniqueness define your strategy and drive your selection and prioritization process.

Strategic objectives are specific, actionable statements of intent. Taken together, they describe your organization’s strategy, whether you are a government agency, nonprofit, or private sector company.

Examples include:

• “Reduce wait times for the people we serve”
• “Improve the cost-effectiveness of services and programs”
• “Increase customer satisfaction”
• “Reduce operating costs”

Why Strategic DNA Matters

Collectively, a dozen or so well-crafted strategic objectives, when linked together in a strategy map, tell the story of how your organization creates value for citizens of a government, members of an association, or customers of a business. The strategy map uses cause–effect logic to visually show how value is created and sustained. When organizations in all sectors prioritize projects based on strategic DNA, they experience benefits such as:

• Clearer alignment between daily work and strategic goals
• Better execution of strategy
• Improved communication internally and externally
• Better employee understanding of how they “fit” and how their work contributes to mission and vision

Here is how that can look in different sectors:

• Government agencies achieve better citizen outcomes, clearer alignment between programming and citizen needs, and stronger budget defenses for chosen priorities, even under tight fiscal constraints
• Nonprofits see improvements in member or beneficiary support, efficiency, and alignment of employees and volunteers to mission
• Private companies realize clearer goals, improved processes, increased coordination across departments, and clearer communication throughout the organization and externally with customers and stakeholders

Start With the End in Mind

Drawing on a principle popularized by Stephen Covey – “Start with the end in mind” – the approach is not complicated, but it does require discipline, a “connect the dots” mindset, and trust to think outside the box and try a new approach to strategy and execution. The approach begins with organizational mission and vision, not with “What are we doing now?”: 

• Translate vision and mission into three or four high-level strategic themes and results (goals)
• Develop approximately a dozen strategic objectives – the actionable components of the strategic themes
• Link the objectives in a strategy map

The objectives are the DNA of the organization – the structural blueprint of the strategy.

Once that structure is in place, strategic performance measures, project selection and prioritization, and program, process, technology, and employee alignment are just one step away. The result is improved strategy execution based on a clearly communicated, logical, and defensible strategy. A concise, one-page balanced strategic plan clearly communicates goals, direction, priorities, and accountability.

The example above is a one-page balanced strategic plan for an energy company we help facilitate through the process described in this blog. If you work in a nonprofit or a business, see the nonprofit and business editions of this article for sector-specific examples.

The Strategic Prioritization Process

In the figure above, the rightmost column is the result of a disciplined prioritization process, with initiatives linked directly to strategy. The steps are:

• Identify potential projects (initiatives) – create the starting list of potential investments
• Develop strategy-supporting selection criteria and a project proposal template – create a level playing field for evaluation
• Describe candidate projects using the template – understand project benefits, costs, and strategic impact
• Select a prioritization ranking framework – promote consistency and build consensus
• Consider additional influencing factors – apply informed judgement (for example, political priorities or regulatory requirements) to analytical results
• Rank projects against the selection criteria – create A list, B list, and C list project portfolios for budget discussions
• Fund prioritized projects based on available resources – build the STRATEX, CAPEX, and OPEX budgets

Improving Strategy Execution

We have used this strategic prioritization approach successfully with clients in more than 80 countries over the past 25 years. This process yields a more defensible portfolio of projects – a more logical way of saying “yes” and, equally important, a more defensible way of saying “no” to proposed projects that don’t support strategy.

If you want to start with the end in mind, use strategy DNA to improve project selection and prioritization and to improve organizational outcomes, consider attending one of our facilitation workshops or professional certification programs, offered worldwide in conjunction with George Washington University College of Professional Studies:

Strategy Execution Professional
Key Performance Indicator Professional
Balanced Scorecard Professional
OKR Professional