Strategies

Total Competitive Strategies for project management.

Overall cost leadership Strategy This strategy approach aims at reduction in cost, based to great extent on experience. Thus the emphasis may be on keeping a close watch on costs in areas such as research and development, sales, and services. The objective is for a company to have a low cost structure compared with that if its competition.

Differentiation Strategy A company following a differentiation strategy attempts to offer something unique in the industry in respect to products or service.

Focused Strategy A company adopting a focused strategy concentrates on special groups of customers, a particular product line, a specific geographic region, or other aspects that become the focal points of the firm’s efforts. Rather than serving the total industry with its products or services, an enterprise may emphasize a specific segment of the market. This may be accomplished by a low-cost strategy differentiation, or both.

Successful Implementation of Strategies.

Communicating strategies to all key Decision-making manages. It does little good to formulate meaningful strategies unless they are communicated to all those managers who are in a position to make decisions on programs and plans designed to implement them. Nothing has been communicated unless is clear to the receiver. Strategies may be clear to the executive committee members and the chief executive who participated in developing them. However, strategies should be communicated in writing, and top executives and their subordinates must make sure that everyone involved in implementing strategies understands them.

Developing and communicating planning premises

The importance of planning promises will be stressed later in this chapter. Managers must develop premises critical to plans and decisions, explain them to all those in the decisions making chain, and give instructions to develop program and make decisions in line with them. Too few organizations do this. But if premises do not include key assumptions about the environment in which plans will operate. Decisions are likely to be based on personal assumptions and predilections. This will almost certainly lead to a collection of uncoordinated plans.

Ensuring that action plans contribute to and reflect major objectives and strategies.

Action plans are tactical or operational programs and decisions, major or minor, that take place in a various parts of an organization. If they do not reflect desired objectives and strategies, the result will be vaguer hopes or useless intention. If care is not taken in this area, strategic planning is not likely to have a bottom-line impact , that is, to have an important effect on company profits.

Reviewing Strategies regularly

Even carefully developed strategies may cease to be suitable if conditions change. Therefore, they should be reviewed from time to time, certainly not less than once a year for major strategies and perhaps more often.

Developing contingency strategies and programs

If considerable change in competitive factors or other elements in the environment may occur, strategies for such contingencies should be formulated. No one, of course, can wait to make plans until a future environment is certain. Even if there is considerable uncertainly and events may occur that make a given set of objectives, strategies, or programs obsolete, a manager has no choice but to proceed on the most credible set of premises he or she can come up with at a given time. But even then, one need not ne totally unprepared if certain possible contingencies do occur. Contingencies plans can provide a degree of preparation.

Making the organization structure fit planning need

The organization structure, with its systems of delegations, should be designed to help manages accomplish goals and make the decisions necessary to put plans into effect. If possible, one person should be responsible of the accomplishment of each goal and for the implementation of strategies to achieve this goal. In other words, end-result areas and key tasks should be identified and assigned to an single position as fan down the organization structure as is feasible. Since such an assignment sometimes cannot be made, there may be no alternative but to utilize a form of matrix organization, a type of organization structure.

Continuing to emphasize planning and implementing strategy

Even if an organization has a workable system of objectives and strategies and their implementation, the system can easily fail unless responsible manages continue to stress the nature and importance of these elements. This process may seem tedious and unnecessarily repetitious, but it is the best way to make sure that members of an organization learn about them. Teaching does not necessarily mean conducting seminars; rather, much of the teaching can take place in the day – to –day interaction between superiors and subordinates.

Creating a company climate that force planning

People tend to allow problems and crises of today to interfere with effective planning for tomorrow. The only way to ensure that planning will be done is to develop strategies carefully and to take pains to implement them.