Why not Strategic Project Management?

COMMENTARY

By Dr. O. Chima Okereke, PhD

UK and Nigeria

Executive Summary

This paper makes a case for the use of strategic project management instead of normal traditional project management in competitive businesses and in working on projects with unusual challenges. This submission is presented and then backed up with two real-life examples.

The first example is the success in the planning and implementation of strategic marketing campaign in the sale of a project management series of software products.

The second is the success in executing some rural community programme for the reactivation of abandoned infrastructure without any formally provided funds.

Functional Comparison of Project Management with Strategic Project Management

For a start, a definition of Project Management, which the writer likes using, is the

time-constrained application of knowledge, skills, tools, and processes to translate decisions made in business, corporate, or national boardrooms into measurable products and services that should meet the needs of identified customers using agreed resources. It is generally described as consisting of five phases, namely: Initiating, Planning, Executing, Monitoring and Controlling, and Closing.

Before discussing Strategic Project Management, it could be helpful to review some basic concepts and fundamentals of project management. The concept of five phases of project management is said, sometimes, to lead to a strict focus on only the execution of projects to the exclusion of strategic considerations. This focus derives from considering project management essentially as an execution discipline with the main objective of delivering a project on time, in budget, and to scope. This could create a tactical tunnel vision within organizations. This tunnel vision has led many organizations to implement formal project management processes to create a tactical mind set at a time when the strategic use of resources could be vital to them. This tactical thinking is exactly what is needed for ensuring that ‘things get done’ within a project, but strategic thinking is often needed in commercial and competitive markets and some real-life situations. Why? It ensures the optimal use of time, human and material resources, and funds such that each project undertaken is aligned with the business and corporate strategy of the organization.

In view of the foregoing, it is necessary that Strategic Project Management (SPM) could be introduced and used for corporate strategy development. It could be defined as the use of the appropriate project management knowledge, skills, tools and techniques in the context of the company’s goals and objectives so that the project deliverables will contribute to company’s value in a way that can be measured…

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How to cite this work: Okereke, O.C. (2025).  Why not Strategic Project Management? Commentary, PM World Journal, Vol. XIV, Issue V, May.  Available online at https://pmworldlibrary.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/pmwj152-May2025-Okereke-why-not-strategic-project-management.pdf

About the Author

O Chima Okereke, PhD, PMP

Herefordshire, UK

Dr. O. Chima Okereke, Ph.D., MBA, PMP, Senior Member IEEE, is the Managing Director and CEO of Total Technology Consultants, Ltd., a project management consulting company working in West Africa and the UK.  He works from his office in the UK. His company, Total Technology Consultants Limited, a project management consulting company, in Africa and UK, was an Oracle gold-level partner.  Between 2002 and end of 2020, the company trained some 600 project professionals on enterprise project management courses in Nigeria and Gabon.

Chima is a multidisciplinary project management professional, a visiting professor, an industrial educator, with over 30 years’ experience in engineering project management consulting, and operations in oil and gas, steel and power generation industries.

For example, from 05/2020 to 12/2024, he worked fully remote, as a leader of an international team of twenty-four professionals from the US, UK, and Africa on a community development programme containing abandoned infrastructural projects. As an engineering project manager, he used a Project Management Office (PMO) structure for the reactivation of the multi-project infrastructure on electricity, water, a school block, etc. From the start, he designed and implemented a roadmap which guided his group in the achievement of their desired goals. One of their achievements was the repair and reactivation of an abandoned water supply network which had overflowed the wellhead and caused a continuous flooding for over six years. It was commissioned by a government parastatal in 2010 but was never serviced even when the community representatives went to the head office of the group in the city. It was so bad that the adjoining roads were flooded, and the houses were vacated by their owners.  Our team fixed the overflow on the 19^{th of} December 2020; the roads and the houses became dry such that homeowners returned.

Before embarking on a career in consulting, he worked for thirteen years in industry rising to the position of a chief engineer in the Delta Steel Company Limited, Aladja, Warri, Nigeria, with specialisation in industrial controls and instrumentation, electronics, and automation. During those 13 years, he worked on most aspects of projects of new industrial plants including design, construction and installation, commissioning, and engineering operation and maintenance in process industries.

Chima sponsored and founded the potential chapter of the Project Management Institute (PMI®) in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, acting as president from 2004 to 2010. The chapter was later subsumed into the larger PMI Nigeria Chapter.

He has a Bachelor of Science Degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Lagos, Lagos in 1975, and a Doctor of Philosophy degree following research in Robotics and a master’s in business administration (MBA) degree from the University of Bradford in the UK in 1994 and 1995, respectively.  He also has a PMP® certification from the Project Management Institute (PMI®) which he passed at first attempt in 2009.  He became a Senior Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in 2019.

He has been a registered engineer with COREN in Nigeria since 1983.  He is a registered consultant with several UN agencies.  More information can be found at http://www.totaltechnologyconsultants.com.