When Good Projects Serve Bad Strategy: Our Guide to Strategic Realignment

Projects often require strategic realignment to adjust for any drift from the original plan. We offer a road map for realigning portfolios with strategic goals and preventing future misalignment.

In brief:

• Well-executed projects can still fail to deliver business value if they deviate from their strategic intent, requiring strategic realignment.
• Strategic drift occurs when projects lose relevance due to changes in business strategies or market conditions, often going unnoticed until companies waste resources.
• Ongoing alignment between project portfolios and strategic goals is essential for maximizing business value and preventing resource drain.
• Leaders must actively review and realign project portfolios to ensure investments support core business priorities.

Even the best-managed projects can quietly derail operations when they drift from strategic intent. Projects that once promised growth and innovation may gradually consume resources without delivering value, or worse, pull an organization away from its core mission.

Recognizing the subtle early signs of misalignment is crucial for leaders who seek to maintain momentum and drive meaningful results. This guide examines how leaders can identify portfolio misalignment, realign investments with organizational goals, and establish governance practices that maintain alignment between strategy and execution.

The Strategic Drift Epidemic

Research from the Project Management Institute indicates that while nearly 74 percent of projects meet their immediate delivery goals, only half achieve the intended business outcomes. That gap highlights a growing epidemic: strategic drift.

Strategic drift develops gradually, often starting with well-intentioned projects that lose relevance as markets or strategies change. Timely correction is complex because leaders may only notice after resources have been spent, teams are fatigued, and executives question the project’s value.

Consider a global healthcare organization that launched dozens of information technology (IT) modernization projects. Each hit its milestones, but a later review revealed 40 percent were disconnected from enterprise objectives. The company had good projects that were poorly aligned with its bad strategy, diverting resources from critical initiatives such as patient access and digital health integration.

Successful execution does not guarantee strategic success. Without ongoing alignment, portfolios accumulate drift, draining resources and reducing business value. If unaddressed, this leads to wasted resources and diminished focus.

Beyond Project Recovery: Understanding Strategic Drift

When projects fail, organizations often assume poor delivery is to blame. However, many misaligned projects are delivered on time, on budget, and in scope. The failure lies in their lack of strategic contribution.

Why does drift occur?

• Market Dynamics: New regulations, technology advances, or competitive moves render once-relevant projects obsolete.
• Organizational Shifts: Mergers, leadership changes, or restructuring create new priorities that projects no longer support.
• Project Blind Spots: Teams focus narrowly on tactical key performance indicators (KPIs) without visibility into enterprise-level strategy.

Today’s unprecedented rate of change is making drift more common than ever. Recently, we were helping a client with an ambitious digital transformation program that included migrating infrastructure to the cloud and designing project prioritization and governance processes.

During the process, several new leaders came on board who had different priorities, leading to confusion among the teams. We had to act quickly to adjust the project for their new objectives. We began by accelerating the new team members’ onboarding process to bring them up to speed. Then, we restored IT staff engagement and created the company’s first project governance process to clarify the changes.

Our actions allowed the company to redirect resources to initiatives supporting long-term growth and strategic objectives, demonstrating a key principle about strategic drift: Like change, drift will happen, and when it does, it’s often because of confusion about priorities rather than delivery incompetence.

The Strategic Alignment Assessment: Portfolio-Wide Health Check

To correct drift, leaders must know it exists. A portfolio-wide alignment assessment surfaces where projects deliver actual value and where they siphon resources.

Four core diagnostic tools:

1. Strategic Coherence Mapping: Link every project to enterprise objectives and strategic goals to confirm relevance.
2. Value Stream Analysis: Score contribution to customer outcomes, market growth, or operational efficiency.
3. Capability Gap Assessment: Determine whether initiatives are developing the necessary organizational capabilities.
4. Dependency Mapping: Reveal cross-project interdependencies that either accelerate or hinder strategy execution.

A simple alignment scorecard might rate projects across four dimensions:

• Strategic Fit: How directly does the project advance enterprise priorities?
• Business Value: What tangible outcomes will it deliver?
• Resource Demand: Does the organization have the capacity to support it?
• Risk Exposure: Are the risks acceptable given the potential value?

Scoring projects against these dimensions creates a transparent, evidence-based view of portfolio health. Instead of relying on instinct, many organizations use strategic alignment scorecards or similar frameworks to visualize how initiatives support enterprise goals.

By scoring projects against factors like strategic fit, business value, and resource demand, leaders gain a clear, portfolio-wide picture of where investment is driving outcomes and where misalignment is quietly draining focus.

Systematic assessment turns intuition into evidence, giving leaders the clarity to make difficult calls about where to invest and where to hold back.

The Strategic Realignment Decision Matrix

Assessment leads to action. Realignment decisions should be grounded in objectivity, not sunk costs. A simple yet powerful tool is the decision matrix, which plots projects on two axes: strategic value (high/low) and execution momentum (high/low).

Four portfolio optimization strategies:

• High Value + High Momentum: Accelerate. Protect these projects and ensure they continue to receive adequate resources.
• High Value + Low Momentum: Support. Allocate resources or redesign workflows to regain traction.
• Low Value + High Momentum: Pivot. Redirect effort toward more relevant outcomes.
• Low Value + Low Momentum: Terminate. Free resources for higher-value initiatives.

Leaders should also weigh the costs of continued operations against the benefits of realignment through return on investment (ROI) modeling. For projects slated to end, adopt graceful wind-down strategies. Capture lessons learned, reallocate resources smoothly, and preserve valuable deliverables to ensure that the termination process strengthens, rather than disrupts, the organization.

This framework helps leaders avoid the trap of continuing projects simply because they’ve already invested heavily. For example, one of our clients, a large church, needed to mature its new enterprise project management office (EPMO). Using our structured assessment and realignment decision matrix, we helped the client focus on scaling demand management and portfolio management capabilities, implementing resource planning and forecasting, and integrating portfolio management tools.

Our work allowed the church to prioritize projects efficiently, align resources with strategic goals, and manage portfolio risks. As a result, they accelerated high-value projects, supported those needing additional resources, and identified initiatives for pivoting or termination to optimize portfolio value. Employees who put a lot of energy into their projects don’t like to hear it, but courageous termination of misaligned projects is one of the clearest markers of strategic discipline.

Organizational Change Management for Strategic Pivots

Strategic realignment is as much about people as it is about projects. Teams often resist pivoting or terminating work they’ve championed. Leaders must manage the emotional side of realignment with care.

Change management strategies that work:

• Executive Alignment: Keep C-suite leaders united with regular updates and consistent messaging.
• Middle-Management Buy-In: Equip managers with communication tools to cascade changes effectively.
• Cultural Transformation: Frame realignment as part of a larger shift toward agility and resilience.

People are the key to achieving these objectives.

As Hilary Lee, Centric Consulting National People and Change Practice Lead, notes: “Realignment succeeds when people feel like participants, not casualties. Clear communication and empowerment transform resistance into advocacy.”

“Integrating project management with change management from day one ensures that change activities are not an afterthought, but a core part of the project’s DNA,” says Centric Consulting Enterprise Portfolio and Program Management National Delivery Lead Rick Morris. “Consider how much more successful your projects and strategic portfolio would be if your company incorporated change activities at the formation of the effort.”

By embedding change management into project planning, organizations ensure that both people and processes are aligned with evolving strategic objectives, maximizing the value of every initiative proactive training and communication. Agile, collaborative approaches build organizational readiness and resilience.

For example, while working with a Fortune 500 financial services company, we fostered functional collaboration between the PMO and change management office (CMO) to close a visibility gap. The PMO team reached out to the CMO team to conduct a change impact assessment focused on features the company was preparing to release. The CMO responded by categorizing the change impact of each new feature as low, medium or high.

This early change impact assessment allowed teams enough lead time visibility, which enabled them to build their training content in plenty of time for each feature release.

This kind of agile management approach works because it considers the organization’s capacity to change and how executives’ knowledge and expertise can help manage the process. As a result, it ensures that you factor in the needs and expertise of various stakeholders to deliver a more comprehensive program management system.

Quantifying Strategic Alignment Impact

Leaders must measure the impact of realignment to prove value and refine governance. Metrics should balance financial outcomes with strategic contribution.

Metrics to track:

• ROI and Time-to-Value: Assess the delivery of benefits against expectations.
• Market Position: Gauge competitive standing after portfolio adjustments.
• Customer Outcomes: Link project alignment to satisfaction, retention or Net Promoter Score (NPS).
• Trajectory Modeling: Forecast long-term benefits of alignment vs. fragmentation.
• Postimplementation Reviews: Capture lessons learned and feed them back into planning cycles.
• EPPM Maturity Assessments: Evaluate people, process and technology capabilities to benchmark progress and highlight gaps.

Organizations with clear alignment frameworks see 58 percent higher employee engagement — a critical yet often overlooked dimension of value.

Realignment delivers value in dollars, a competitive advantage, and a positive culture. Measuring all three proves its worth.

The Basics of Strategic Governance Architecture

Detecting and correcting drift once is not enough. Organizations with adaptive governance structures are more likely to achieve strategic objectives, especially when they include dynamic governance mechanisms, such as:

• Steering Committees and Portfolio Review Boards: These committees should define clear decision rights, ensuring accountability for portfolio direction and resource allocation. Cross-functional representation prevents blind spots and balances enterprise priorities.
• Capacity Planning Adaptive Resource Management: Capacity planning is a subcategory of portfolio management that informs resource management. During capacity planning, leaders intentionally reserve a percentage of time for their work types to ensure work can get completed — not for micromanaging but rather for informing and learning.
• Strategic Checkpoints: Built-in review triggers that pause or pivot projects when drift appears.
• Integrated Planning Cycles: Strategy refreshers directly linked to portfolio reviews to ensure initiatives stay aligned even as business priorities evolve.
• Dashboards and Platforms: Technology that provides real-time visibility into portfolio alignment.

Mechanisms like these help detect and correct drift before it becomes costly. The result is a “living” strategy that keeps up with change and responds to market shifts while staying rooted in business value. Governance isn’t bureaucracy. It’s the preventive system that safeguards strategic resilience.

How to Build Strategic Resilience Through Proactive Alignment

Strategic realignment isn’t about doing more — it’s about ensuring that every project advances what matters most. By diagnosing drift, making objective decisions, managing change with empathy, and embedding governance, organizations build resilience that outlasts market shifts.

Here’s how to get started:

• Begin with a portfolio-wide alignment assessment to spot early signs of misalignment.
• Perform a portfolio-wide health check that scores projects against strategic fit, business value, and resource demand to see where investment is driving outcomes and where misalignment is quietly draining focus.
• Apply the decision matrix to smoothly reallocate resources, remembering to:
  • Balance the costs of continued operations against the benefits of realignment.
  • Adopt graceful wind-down strategies for projects nearing completion.
  • Capture lessons learned.
  • Preserve valuable deliverables to ensure that the termination process strengthens, rather than disrupts, the organization.
• Manage pivots with transparent change strategies, measuring impact across financial, cultural and competitive dimensions.
• Establish governance structures that prevent future drift and metrics that track ongoing alignment.

Strategic Alignment for Successful Project Outcomes

Strategic alignment is more than a discipline. It’s a core organizational capability. Enterprises that sustain alignment outperform peers because their resources are consistently directed toward the highest-value outcomes.

“Alignment is not a one-time event. It’s a living discipline that protects organizations from wasting effort and positions them for resilience,” Lee says.

For more practical tools, see Centric’s perspectives on strategic initiatives and modern portfolio governance.

Ready to ensure your projects serve the right strategy? Connect with our Enterprise Portfolio and Program Management experts to explore how we can support your portfolio optimization journey. Contact us