Strategy to Execution: Closing the Gap

About this webinar

Sometimes the project team is not the problem. If leadership has approved twice as much work as the organization can deliver, better project management cannot make that portfolio possible. That is the tension at the heart of this conversation with Frederic Casagrande and Stuart Easton: organizations can blame execution and try to fix delivery when the real problem sits somewhere else.

Frederic works through three connected stages: define the real problem, define the solution, and prepare the organization for that solution. The useful question is not simply How do we execute better? It is Where is the problem actually coming from?

1. Define the real problem: are you fixing the symptom?

Frederic starts upstream. His why/how hierarchy tests whether strategy actually connects to the choices being made, while the Five Whys keeps pushing past the first visible failure.

He makes the point with the classic robot example: seized bearings lead back to poor lubrication, then to an oil pump that is not circulating enough oil, then to a clogged intake, and finally to the missing filter that caused the problem. Stop asking why too early and you can spend time fixing the wrong thing.

2. Define the solution: is the portfolio still the right one?

Once the problem is understood, strategy has to change commitments. Frederic distinguishes portfolio management, choosing the right work, from project management, delivering that work well. Money already spent does not decide whether future funding and capacity should stay committed, which can mean bringing an existing investment back into the decision.

The same issue becomes harder to ignore when the portfolio is already full and another important initiative arrives. Something has to change somewhere else. As Stuart puts it, “you can't execute your way out” of an impossible situation: an overcommitted portfolio is a governance problem upstream, not something the delivery team can repair.

The speakers add a subtler trap: good teams can keep an impossible situation going for months. When they eventually cannot cope, it looks like a project-management problem even though the cause sits earlier.

3. Prepare the organization: can the change actually land?

Even the right portfolio is not enough if the organization cannot move with it. Frederic uses the Prosci ADKAR model to show why change happens person by person: people move through awareness, desire, knowledge, ability and reinforcement at different speeds. Top-down leadership and bottom-up change both matter.

Stuart also rejects the easy explanation that executives simply don't care. They care about results, but may not see how their own behaviour, organizational design or incentives contribute to the problem. His practical way in is to start with one or two problems leadership already feels, trace them back to the cause, solve something visible and use that credibility to tackle the next problem.

Late in the session, Stuart offers a useful image for the PMO: if all your time goes on rescuing problems downstream, you never get the space to go upstream and stop the conditions that keep creating them.