Strategic initiatives require specialized project management expertise that goes far beyond traditional PM skills. This article explores the hidden costs of using tactical PMs for strategic work, the competency gaps most organizations face internally, and why bringing in specialized strategic project leadership delivers better ROI than internal development efforts.
In brief:
- Strategic project management is critical for specialized initiatives. Traditional PMs often lack the skills to align projects with organizational goals and deliver measurable impact.
- Assigning tactical PMs to strategic projects can lead to hidden costs, stalled progress, and missed ROI opportunities.
- Strategic PMs use forward-thinking analysis, stakeholder influence, and advanced tools (including AI) to mitigate risk and maximize project value.
- Upskilling internal PMs may help, but for high-stakes or complex projects, external specialists in specialized project management accelerate speed to value and reduce risk.
- Watch for red flags like excessive admin work, misaligned goals, shifting road maps, and lack of strategic reporting. These indicate you need specialized project management leadership.
The failure rate of strategic initiatives is staggering: 70 percent of projects involving strategic change either don’t get completed on time or at all. In many cases, reducing the failure rate comes down to understanding the difference between project management and project leadership.
Unfortunately, project management is often a relatively static, administrative process: Has this task been completed? Yes. This one? No. Well, why not?
Project leadership is more proactive: How can we ensure the project is completed in alignment with high-level organizational objectives? How do we execute this phase so it supports the goals of each of these five stakeholders?
The problem is that many organizations unknowingly sabotage their strategic initiatives by selecting project managers when they actually need specialized project leaders. Specialized project leadership combines risk management with actionable solutions that motivate stakeholders to take action. Let’s take a deeper look at what that looks like in practice.
A Day in the Life: What Strategic Project Management Actually Looks Like
My colleague Rick Morris, PMP, Scrum Agile Master Certified and award-winning author, adheres to the philosophy of “Plan forward, don’t report past.” In other words, strategic, specialized project management involves setting the team up for success rather than merely reporting on the progress of each phase.
Here’s how a day in the life of a strategic special project manager looks when juxtaposed with that of an administrative, tactical project manager (PM).
The project we’ll consider involves implementing an enterprise customer relationship management (CRM) system, which requires a combination of technical and business skill sets.
A tactical PM’s day may focus on:
- Checking the cost of human and technological resources to make sure they align with budget numbers
- Checking the contracts of vendors used for implementing the CRM
- Building a Gantt chart that details the project steps and dependencies
- Tracking tickets for troubleshooting issues in the CRM’s implementation
As a result of the PM’s efforts, the CRM goes live and within budget.
OK, not bad.
But only a few teams adopt the CRM. The sales team feels it takes too long to log customer-related activities. Marketing likes it but has no idea how to collaborate with sales. Siloes remain in place. Many stakeholders don’t feel it makes their jobs easier. And some who actually adopt it revert back to spreadsheets within a few weeks.
Now, let’s peek over the shoulder of a strategic project management leader.
A strategic PM starts their day by reflecting on the company’s goal, which is to evolve into a more customer-centric, data-powered organization. This will require redesigning business processes, specifically those related to lead qualification and strategic postsale follow-ups.
To meet these objectives, a strategic project leader:
- Interviews stakeholders to understand how the new CRM can deliver value, both for their workflows and the company’s shift toward customer centricity
- Meets with the CRM implementation team to get details around how its marketing automation and analytics tools meet the needs of both the marketing and sales teams
- Designs key performance indicators (KPIs) to gauge CRM usage and its return on investment (ROI) for each team
- Builds an incentive structure to drive early adoption
As a result, the CRM implementation is successful — and not just from a logistical, all-boxes-checked standpoint. The strategic project leader acts as a change agent, aligning the project’s vision with that of the organization. There’s no question that the CRM adds value, and process integration is efficient and smooth.
In strategic project management, the end goal is not the project simply going live. Success is measured by behavioral change and measurable performance improvements.
But it’s common for an organization to end up with an administrative, tactical project manager whose expertise, while valuable, doesn’t deliver substantive value. This can result in a number of hidden costs.
The Hidden Costs of Mismatched PM Expertise
When a project requires specialized project managers but receives a tactical one, issues often arise, including scope creep and timeline delays.
Tactical project managers are great at execution. They manage scope, schedule and resources to keep projects on track and deliver defined outputs. While this is valuable, strategic project managers accomplish more.
Strategic project managers operate with a broader lens by aligning initiatives with business goals, navigating complex stakeholder environments, and driving outcomes like ROI and speed to value.
Both roles are essential: Tactical PMs ensure delivery discipline and consistency, while strategic PMs elevate impact through foresight, adaptability and business acumen.
However, when strategic project management isn’t in place, stakeholder engagement can slip, resulting in missed opportunities to maximize the project’s value for the organization.
Morris provides a case in point: “A client of ours assigned a tactical project manager to lead a strategic transformation initiative, assuming strong execution would be enough. While the PM handled tasks efficiently, the project quickly stalled — milestones were slipping, and stakeholder engagement was inconsistent.
“The main issue was a mismatch in expectations: The initiative required strategic framing, cross-functional alignment, and outcome-driven leadership, which the tactical PM wasn’t equipped (or supported) to provide.”
To rescue the project from failure, Centric Consulting intervened. Once Centric introduced a more senior and strategic PM, the project was reframed around measurable impact, stakeholder trust was rebuilt, and delivery accelerated.
“Leadership as a key skill for PMs is oftentimes missed due to a lack of understanding of the level of project complexity and risk,” Senior Manager for Enterprise Portfolio and Program Management Craig Horgan, says. “When a project is scoped at the beginning, identifying the right level of PM is critical to success. If you don’t, you’ll most likely end up in project stall or, worse yet, recovery.”
To avoid getting pinned into a situation where you’re trying to recover from a failed project, identify exactly what kind of leader the project needs to succeed. This often starts by identifying the competency gaps that need to be filled.
The Strategic PM Competency Gap: What’s Missing Internally
A successful project often boils down to effective risk mitigation. The most important ingredient for your project management office (PMO) is using forward-thinking analysis instead of backward-looking reporting.
As Morris puts it: “Good PMs can come up with charts and graphs and show where the project has risk. Great PMs can move the needle through influence using those charts and graphs to affect outcomes.”
Fortunately, a great PM has a deep toolbox at their disposal as they turn numbers into narratives. One of these tools is artificial intelligence (AI).
“AI won’t replace project management, but you will be replaced by a project manager who knows how to use AI effectively,” Horgan says.
But AI isn’t enough. Even with AI tools at their disposal, many teams still lack the strategic vision to mitigate risk and maximize project value.
On the other hand, methodologies that involve experience-hardened, strategic project management frameworks will drive impact without exacerbating risk.
Key to these methodologies is engineering influence. This goes beyond traditional PM skills and requires targeted project management placement with an eye for gaining support from exactly the right people. Influencing a range of stakeholders to get behind a project drives its adoption and powers its success.
For many organizations, the strategic PM role is hard to fill. They have very competent tactical PMs who may dabble in some strategy, but that’s not really their expertise. This is where a role-based approach makes a difference. By drawing the boundaries between strategic and tactical PMs, you clarify responsibilities and clearly define what success looks like for your PMs.
Given these nuanced yet crucial capabilities, many companies choose to outsource their project management to specialists. In some instances, upskilling from within your PMO may be a viable option. However, that also has its drawbacks.
Why Upskilling Isn’t Always the Answer
Upskilling from within comes with a few distinct advantages. Internal development makes sense when companies have the time and ability to invest in long-term capability building. It’s especially effective for strengthening delivery consistency, growing leadership from within, and embedding cultural alignment across teams.
However, external expertise is critical when the initiative is high-stakes, time-sensitive or strategically complex.
“Specialized strategic PMs typically bring proven methodologies, transformation experience, and business acumen that accelerate speed to value and reduce risk,” Horgan says. “They’re often the right choice when internal teams lack the bandwidth or strategic depth to lead enterprise-level change.”
It’s equally important to consider the downsides of upskilling a standard project management role in terms of project success and the less obvious opportunity risk. This involves analyzing:
- Cost of Project Management. Does it cost more to build internal capabilities or engage an external strategic PM that already has the enterprise project expertise and experience you need?
- Speed to Value. With external project management staffing, you get immediate expertise, but when developing internal team members, there’s a learning curve delay.
- Risk Mitigation. By partnering with an external team, you get proven methodologies, but by building your own PM team, you may have to develop experimental approaches.
Whether you’re upskilling internal staff or using an external PM, your focus should be on whether your project management delivers effective strategy. Getting your team up to speed on what that involves starts with a shift in mindset around Morris’ “Plan forward, don’t report past” philosophy.
However, you must then assess whether your approach is sufficiently strategic. Here’s how.
Red Flags: Is Your PM Approach Strategic Enough?
Look out for these red flags, which may indicate your PM approach isn’t as strategic as it should be:
- PMs spend a lot of time on administrative tasks. Their days are consumed by managing backlogs or building road maps that are essentially just fancy feature lists. You should have the PM focus on aligning initiatives with value and building KPIs to guide progress.
- Project goals aren’t aligned with the organization’s objectives, such as specific market outcomes or efficiency boosts. To combat this, you can use backward design, asking, “How does X goal get us closer to Y objective?”
- Project road maps often change or exceed their scope instead of being guided by a clear vision. Realigning road maps involves vetting each one according to the tangible effect it has on your momentum toward your vision.
- Leadership only receives reports about delivery velocity rather than how project features will bring future benefits, such as substantial market impacts. To build more effective reports, describe the ROI of individual features in terms of revenue or efficiency improvements.
- Team members don’t understand the “why” behind the project strategy, and they’re only immersed in the “how” and “when.” Bridging this gap is easy if you hold weekly huddles to reinforce the most important “whys.”
If you’re seeing one or more red flags, don’t worry. By partnering with an experienced PM team, you can change course.
The Path Forward: Specialized Strategic Project Leadership
Centric employs a role-based approach to consulting, ensuring the right combination of tactical and strategic special project managers. The approach ensures that tactical project managers don’t have to deliver on strategic tasks. At the same time, strategic project leaders can focus on strategy rather than spending inordinate amounts of time performing tactical duties.
For instance, you may already have an effective tactical PM on your team. They may not have much experience formulating and executing PM strategies. In this case, Centric can clarify this person’s tactical responsibilities while providing a strategic PM to work alongside them and the rest of the team.
With the expertise of strategic PM specialists, you accelerate your success. Strategic PMs have years of experience guiding projects and organizations toward their goals. They also bring effective measurement metrics to the table that make it easy to quantify each project’s impact on your organization’s revenue.
If, after considering the factors and red flags above, you recognize a gap, what should you do? It may be better to buy than build your strategic PM capabilities.
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Our expert strategic PMs use results-proven tools to boost revenue and efficiency. Explore Centric’s capabilities and see how they align with your organization’s project goals. To get started, reach out to our Enterprise Portfolio and Program Management team to evaluate your current project approach. Let's talk
