Why is it important to align projects with organizational strategy?-The Project Management Talks
Summary
TLDRIn this podcast episode of 'Project Management Docs', host Vinita interviews Natalia, a project manager at Alpha Surf. They discuss the criticality of aligning projects with organizational strategy, using Alpha Surf's focus on expanding marketplaces and enhancing business intelligence tools as a case study. Natalia emphasizes the importance of strategic alignment for resource optimization and achieving company goals. She outlines their feedback-driven development process, which balances client requests, project strategy, and technical improvements. Tools like Jira, Confluence, and various Atlassian apps facilitate this alignment across teams, ensuring everyone works towards a common vision.
Takeaways
- 📚 Natalia from Alpha Surf discusses the importance of aligning projects with organizational strategy for achieving company goals.
- 🌟 Alpha Surf is a marketplace vendor with a focus on business intelligence tools, aiming to extend their presence across various marketplaces.
- 🔍 The company's strategy includes not only adding new apps but also ensuring the success and growth of existing ones to outperform competitors.
- 👥 Strategic alignment requires collaboration across all teams, including development, marketing, sales, and customer support, to work towards common goals.
- 💡 Natalia emphasizes the need for a balance between customer-requested features and those that align with the organization's strategic objectives.
- 🛠 The company uses a feedback-driven development process, incorporating client requests and strategic tasks into their product roadmap.
- 📝 Scrum framework is utilized for task management, with a backlog of tasks prioritized based on alignment with goals and client value.
- 🔄 Regular evaluation and reassessment of tasks and goals ensure that the development process remains flexible and responsive to change.
- 🛑 Natalia warns of the risks of resource wastage and project delays if teams work on features not aligned with the overall strategy.
- 🔧 Tools like Jira, Confluence, and various Atlassian apps are used for project management, ensuring all team members have access to the same information and tools.
- 📊 Business intelligence tools, such as dashboards for Microsoft Power BI, help visualize progress and team efforts, allowing for better strategic decision-making.
Q & A
What is the main topic of the podcast session with Natalia?
-The main topic of the podcast session is the alignment of projects to organizational strategy.
Who is Natalia in the context of the podcast?
-Natalia is an experienced project manager from Alpha Surf who is invited to share her insights on project management.
What does Alpha Surf primarily focus on in terms of business?
-Alpha Surf primarily focuses on business intelligence tools, such as connectors from Jira to various platforms like Microsoft Power BI, Tableau, BigQuery, and Oracle Analytics.
What is the significance of strategic alignment in project management according to Natalia?
-Strategic alignment ensures that all company processes are built to best support the achievement of company goals, and it's crucial for effective resource utilization and meeting project goals.
What is Alpha Surf's goal for the upcoming year as mentioned by Natalia?
-Alpha Surf's goal for the upcoming year is to extend the number of marketplaces they work on and add new apps, ensuring the success and growth of both new and existing projects.
How does Natalia describe the importance of collaboration among different teams in an organization?
-Natalia emphasizes that all teams, including development, marketing, sales, and customer support, must work together and be on the same page to align projects with the organizational strategy.
What is the role of the development team in the context of strategic alignment?
-The development team should devote its resources to features that align with the overall project and organizational goals, avoiding the development of features that are not aligned with the strategy.
What is the potential consequence of a team working on projects not aligned with the organizational strategy?
-The potential consequence is a waste of resources, delayed or unmet project goals, and a negative impact on the company's ability to achieve its objectives.
What process does Natalia's team use to ensure that projects align with their strategy?
-Natalia's team uses a feedback-driven development process within the Scrum framework, where they maintain a backlog of tasks, evaluate client requests, and plan sprints to balance feature development, client requests, and technical improvements.
What tools and technologies does Natalia mention for promoting alignment across teams in an organization?
-Natalia mentions using Atlassian tools like Jira and Confluence, as well as other tools such as Canva, Pajero, Microsoft Power BI, and various add-ons for Jira to promote alignment and collaboration across teams.
How does Natalia view the role of customer feedback in the development process?
-Natalia views customer feedback as a crucial part of the development process, as it helps to prioritize features and improvements that are valuable to clients and align with the organization's goals.
What is the purpose of using the Appraise tool in Natalia's organization?
-The Appraise tool is used for tracking OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) for the organization and teams, allowing them to align their objectives and evaluate their performance at the end of each quarter.
How does Natalia plan to integrate the feedback from using their own products back into their development process?
-Natalia plans to use the feedback from using their own products to improve the user experience, integrate the feedback into their development strategy, and potentially visualize the data through dashboards for better understanding of team efforts.
Outlines
😀 Introduction to Project Management Alignment
The video script opens with an introduction by Vinita, a product manager at Emmy voids Technologies, to a series of podcasts featuring project managers discussing project management insights. Today's focus is on aligning projects with organizational strategy, with guest Natalia, a project manager from alpha surf. Natalia explains that strategic alignment ensures all company processes support the achievement of company goals, using alpha surf's focus on business intelligence tools across various marketplaces as an example. The company's strategy includes expanding the number of marketplaces and improving existing apps to stay competitive.
😨 The Consequences of Misalignment
In the second paragraph, Natalia discusses the potential consequences of projects not aligned with the organizational strategy, using a hypothetical scenario of a software company with various teams. If one team, such as development, works on features not aligned with the company's goals, it can lead to wasted resources and misalignment across other teams like sales and marketing. Natalia emphasizes the importance of all teams working together, having a shared understanding of the company's direction, and frequently checking in to ensure everyone is on track with the strategy.
🔄 Feedback-Driven Development Process
Natalia shares alpha surf's feedback-driven development process, which involves a plan for the year that includes implementing new features, improving infrastructure, and addressing client requests. The company uses the scrum framework, maintaining a backlog of tasks that are evaluated for alignment with company goals. If a client requests a feature, it's discussed and, if valuable, added to the backlog. Sprint planning involves estimating task complexity and building a roadmap, with an emphasis on balancing client requests, project strategy tasks, and technical debt to ensure continuous product improvement and customer satisfaction.
🛠️ Tools for Promoting Alignment Across Teams
In the final paragraph, Natalia discusses the tools and technology used at alpha surf to promote alignment across teams. She highlights Atlassian's suite of tools, including Jira for task management, Confluence for documentation, and various other apps for collaboration. The company also uses business intelligence tools like dashboards for Microsoft Power BI to visualize team progress. Natalia mentions the importance of communication and feedback, not just from customers but also from internal stakeholders like developers, to improve the product and align it with the organization's strategy.
Mindmap
Keywords
💡Project Management
💡Organizational Strategy
💡Alignment
💡Marketplace
💡Business Intelligence Tools
💡Scrum Framework
💡Feedback-Driven Development
💡Technical Debt
💡Jira
💡Confluence
💡Atlassian
💡OKRs
Highlights
Vinita introduces the podcast series focusing on project management insights.
Natalia, an experienced project manager from Alpha Surf, discusses the importance of aligning projects to organizational strategy.
Strategic alignment ensures all company processes support the achievement of company goals.
Alpha Surf's focus includes business intelligence tools and expanding their presence on various marketplaces.
The company aims to extend the number of marketplaces and apps while maintaining success in existing ones.
Natalia emphasizes the need for all teams to work together for strategic alignment.
Discussing the consequences of teams working on misaligned projects within a company.
The importance of aligning projects to avoid wasting resources and meeting organizational goals.
Natalia shares feedback-driven development processes at Alpha Surf.
The use of the Scrum framework for task management and incorporating client requests into the development cycle.
Balancing customer feature requests with the company's strategic goals for product development.
The collaboration between development, marketing, and sales teams for successful project alignment.
Utilizing Atlassian tools like Jira and Confluence for project management and documentation.
Integrating business intelligence tools for visualizing team progress and efforts.
The use of Appraise for tracking OKRs and aligning team objectives within the organization.
Natalia's personal experience with using the company's own products for project management.
The potential for integrating Appraise with Microsoft Power BI for better visualization of project metrics.
Vinita thanks Natalia for her insights and invites viewers to follow for more content.
Transcripts
foreign
and welcome to project management docs
my name is Vinita I am a project product
manager at Emmy voids Technologies
in the series of podcasts we bring
together project Managers from around
the world to share their insights and
learnings about project management
in today's session we will be discussing
about alignment of projects to
organizational strategy we have with us
today Natalia who is the project manager
and experienced project manager from
alpha surf hi Natalia Welcome to our
show and thank you so much for joining
us
hello thank you so much for inviting me
so
um Natalia we would like to know
um what do you think or organizational
strategy uh is and why do we I mean what
is the importance of aligning
um projects to organizational strategy
um so yeah uh as I said uh strategic
alignment means that all processes in
the company are built to
uh best support the achieving of the
company goal
uh that sounds a bit extra so I think
we'll dive deep in more details and see
our example
um I know you've already had a talk with
my colleague Anna drinska earlier
she told a lot about officer how it
started what we do what our goals and
plans which is most important for us
here
uh so to recap it briefly uh Alpha surf
is a multiplayer multiple Marketplace
vendor
so we have
a few marketplaces we are working on for
example atlassian Shopify servicenow
um
zendesk and I think I might forget a few
because I'm
strictly focused on the International
Development team so it's my
field of responsibilities but we have a
lot of other Max bases and we have a lot
of
apps on the atlasian marketplace mainly
our focus is again on business
intelligence tools like
connectors from jira to Microsoft
powerbit tableau bigquery
Oracle analytics sub analytics and we
have one more on the go we are
developing it right now I'm not sure I
can say it yet but I think Anna will
announce this just soon soonish so we
are going to test it and
bring into release
I can go on and on here again because
that's my most favorite topic to talk
about our apps but back to strategy
our main goal is to in this upcoming
year to extend the number of these
marketplaces so not only these I named
in maybe a few wife a lot but if you
want and to add new apps so we have to
we want to have a lot of marketplaces
and not to remain
solely all the one so don't keep all
layers in one basket right and of course
we want to beat our competitors on the
existing Marketplace because we don't
want to chase new things and neglect the
old ones right that are already
successful yes yeah so so this is how
our strategy has to be aligned with the
goals so we won this new marketplaces we
want new add-ons and we want the old
ones to be successful and to thrive so
we have to plan all projects and
everything within to accomplish it to
make it happen and this is where all our
processes and all teams like development
Marketing sales
quality assurance customers support so
we all have to work together
to make it happen
that's really that's so I think this is
the Strategic alignment here yes so I
guess it's about all the teams working
together and uh having being on us being
on the same page while understanding
what the organization is moving towards
and hence putting their efforts towards
uh similar projects that are going to
contribute to that
yes
um so uh having said this like what do
you think is the most
um important thing like why do we need
to consider
um like why do new companies or startups
need to consider uh you know picking up
projects that are aligned to their
organization strategy
okay so yeah going back to that
organizational strategy uh let's imagine
um
average software company so it's been
working for quite a while it has some
experience it has a few teams like
development teams sales team marketing
teams so everything is there it's not
brand new and to people just there so
but what happens if they have a goal
like have a lot of money have a lot of
customers so something like everyone
does
they have a strategy how to achieve that
but let's say one of the teams for
example development teams decides to
devote it its resources to some features
that are not aligned with this project
goal so they developed some features
that are fun and useful for them but not
for the overall strategy
I think what we'll we'll see there is
soon enough is that other teams like
sales teams marketing team will see the
consequences pretty soon after this and
the project will always be will be heard
in this studies in this way and the same
goes to other teams but for marketing
teams sales team if one team or if was
other or a few teams work separately and
not align with the project at all and
project strategy uh the project goal
will be at least postponed or
even not met
in the nearest Future so
all resources all managing systems have
to work together to have to come have to
come up with a plan and strategy discuss
it together and check up on it uh
frequently to see that everyone is on
the same page and everything everyone is
going in the right direction so the
strategy is working and the plan is on
track so everything should be fine right
right I think it's also a huge waste of
resources right to do something that is
uh not aligned and eventually won't help
uh the company or the customers in the
long run
yes maybe if it's just one feature or
something small is just fine because it
won't hurt but if it's a tendency if
it's
something that happens normally
throughout the long period of time it
will hurt the project level for sure
right
um so I was um thinking about what you
said regarding you know
um all the teams uh you know being on
the right page and coming together
working together uh I was wondering if
you could share with us uh a few
processes uh that you know would help
our organizational organizations to um
align their projects better towards uh
their strategy
yeah that's a great question
um I think we'll share the officer for
example here uh so
we have a so-called feedback driven
development
so of course we have a plan which we
um for the upcoming year we discussed it
we
we want to achieve some
to implement some features new features
to get those new add-ons and everything
to improve infrastructure so we have a
plan to of what we want to do but this
plan is not to time dance it's not too
crammed with all those features so we
plan ahead to have a lot of time to be
devoted to the client requests right so
how it works for us we work by scrum
framework
um
we have a backlog of all tasks and that
our team wants to
to implement to complete
so let's see let's say that a client a
customer reaches our technical support
and requests some kind of feature okay
um technical support engineers
pass this request to the development
team and we discuss it together and we
evaluate whether it's meeting our goals
I if it has value to our other clients
and to our add-on
so if I want to do it
if the answer is yes then we put this
task into the backlog
and on the next spring planning we
discuss this task and developers
estimate its complexity estimate how
much time it
they they assume will take to continue
of course life happens and everything
can change quickly but still we try to
estimate everything to to build our
roadmap
so they estimated and
we also try to put tasks from different
categories to the Sprint
so we try to add client requests because
uh we want to have a superior customer
service and to
to work towards this feedback yes we
want to add some tasks from our project
strategy uh because we again want to be
on track with everything we wanted to
achieve in the beginning of the year
what we planned
we also try to add developers requests
uh it's usually some kind of technical
debt because it's also can be neglected
because developers know what has to be
done so what our product is inter
quality so we pick a few tasks from each
category and
then the client can
receive his feature anytime soon so it
might be not the upcoming screen because
we have a lot of clients and the feature
can be too complex to achieve it in one
screen but
um we will achieve it in the nearest
feature and if we don't select this
feature to poor development for some
reasonable maybe it's available just for
this one client or something
we say this to the client but I think
it's a pretty rare situation I don't
remember much of listings
so that's how it works here we have
scrum we have a requests we try to mix
and match every types of these two to
come along with the goal yeah so yes I
believe I think um that there has to be
a right balance between uh you know
which features we accept from the
customers and uh which features you know
are eventually going to help uh the
product or the project uh evolve and for
the organization to be successful in the
future and I really like about how you
spoke about the collaboration you know
taking inputs from all the stakeholders
and not just the customers and I think
that's really important because um in
the end even developers actually work
very closely with the product even
internal stakeholders work closely with
a product and and are able to suggest a
lot of features
um or improvements uh within the product
or the project uh which will you know
eventually
um
help in a better user experience for the
customers
um yes and we work with our marketing
team for example uh in club enclosed so
when the feature is ready and to be
released we tell them that it's a nice
feature to be promoted to be told to to
people so yeah that's something we
we work with other team to achieve too
but yes I believe that that involves a
lot of communication and back and forth
with a with several teams right so uh I
was wondering if you could share with us
some of the tools uh or what is the
technology that you would use uh to you
know uh promote this alignment across
all the teams in the organization
yeah well as I'm a project manager of
the atlasian team that's not a bigger
surprise that I choose jira and
Conference and classical apps various
apps to work with so the main advantage
of potassium tools is that everything is
in one place so you have all tasks
including all Financial tasks and
marketing desks so they also work with
scrum they have Sprints they have
goals to achieve so they have their
separate backlogs
uh all workloads reports so everything
in Amity we have a project documentation
customer documentation we have
everything there when we perform
retrospective meetings or planning
meetings or anything like that uh we
keep this information in Confluence and
we can refer to it later so everything
is there and it's really convenient of
course we use our own apps because we
are our main customers I could say yes I
agree not I mean of course but still but
we are testing it thoroughly yeah we use
for example checklist for jira uh to
list all tasks steps we need to complete
before the task can be moved to release
we use Smart gate integration but jira
it's awesome tool for developers the way
they see how issues are synchronized
with the branches in gitlab in our
situation about other providers are fine
too we have canva Pajero and Canada for
conference this is the tool that our
marketing team uses a lot
and many others we use our business
intelligence tools tool for example
dashboards for Microsoft
power bi uh they visualize the progress
and the effort of the teams
and in a beautiful way and again we can
test our own Solutions so we see our own
data we see how it's visualized and we
see if everything is okay
yes I think yeah you can input some some
new ideas to the backlog and then again
we're
incorporate it into the plan to the
strategy and
make it better and we use other apps too
like other vendors we have face tools
Pro for Confluence because Confluence on
its own is a bit harder to use
uh we have white boards or
retrospectives
we have tempo of course everyone knows
it we use it for work logs and we
have partnership with them
so I I can name even more but it's just
I will take more time I guess
thank you about uh release notes yes and
I always wanted to check it out so um I
think I'll do it in the next print yes
please do I mean we use it too for our
application and it's really helpful
um you know can we keep communicating
the information to uh our stakeholders
internal and external stakeholders as to
which uh which new features have been
released which are the bugs that have
been fixed and I think they have made
quite a few improvements on the uh
application as well in the last few
weeks
um I think it's very interesting how you
know while while working on the product
that we're working on we also use the
product and hence you know we are able
to experience it as a Creator and as a
customer and uh I think one of the
products that I work on is appraised and
um appraises an organizational tool to
help uh you know apart from HR other HR
activities we have okrs which are you
know objective and key results so uh in
this tool the organization can track
um how like we can have objective and
key results for Organization for teams
and we can align them together and
um so each team can be working on their
own objectives and own okrs and at the
end of the quarter we come together and
say okay how did we do this quarter uh
have you achieved our goals and how can
we uh you know an exporter which are the
goals which are the objectives that we
want to carry forward or
um you know some of the learnings that
we get from here are how do we want to
explore that and you know improve on
that in the next quarter I think
um uh we have started we want to start
using this app ourselves and uh see you
know how it benefits us and also taking
that back
um you know giving feedback to our
employees using the same application
giving feedback to team members as to
how we can
um you know appreciating them for their
help for example
um uh sujit who normally uh you know
conducts these project management talk
really helped me out this time as to how
to set it up what kind of questions to
ask I was nervous before attending the
session as well but I think talking to
somebody who's done it like really
helped me out so I think um giving going
back to the application giving him the
feedback about that really helps as well
um is that something we could use too
and I also can see how we can
incorporate it integrate it to our
Microsoft power bi connector so
if these metrics help project managers
to see or even stakeholders to see the
effort of the team we can use it for the
dashboards and to visualize it and you
know add some nice pie charts and
everything else and make it nice
so yeah we can even integrate our tools
together
yes definitely would love to do that
yes
um with that Natalia we've come to the
end of our session and um thank you so
much for sharing your insights and
learnings with us and I would also like
to thank
um our viewers who are watching this
podcast right now and if you would like
to see more of this content you could
subscribe to YouTube channel of amiboids
Technologies or also follow us on
thank you so much everyone bye-bye
thank you so much
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