The business value of project leadership

When Mannaz works with businesses to develop project managers and leaders, we focus on successful strategy execution, the speed of innovation, higher project margins and lower write-downs. In fact, we believe that project leadership is one of the most important capabilities in an organisation for generating real business value. But how do we quantify project leadership and the generated business value?

In order to answer these questions, we invited a number of practitioners to share their experiences in the survey ‘Business Value of Project Leadership’, which was carried out in 2013–2014.

One of the key findings to emerge from the survey is that project leadership can – and does – deliver high value to organisations, where executives and senior management consciously create the context that projects deliver strategic objectives.

From 36 topic areas across the spectrum of project management, four key findings emerge:

• Complexity is frequently evident in the project environment
• A strong connection between corporate strategy and projects facilitates project delivery
• Delivery of business benefits is often poorly accomplished

The application of ‘standard’ models of project management must be adapted to suit the specific organisational context. The full report The business value of project leadership is available for download:

The main findings of the study has also been elaborated in separate articles. The articles are available for download below.

Projects bring strategies to life

The main findings from the survey regarding if and how projects bring business value are described in this article.

We don’t kill projects – we start new ones

Another issue we set out to investigate in the survey, was why many organisations find it difficult to terminate projects which no longer create business value. The findings are described in this article.

The Projects Executive Officer.

Empowered to deliver This article focus on the changing role of the project leaders, now concentrating much more on the context of the project, handling a significantly larger and more varied amount of stakeholders, and implementing the business strategy through the projects.

About the survey:

• 45 practitioners from
• 30 international companies participated in the survey.
• The survey is based on semi-structured interviews, following a fixed questionnaire around the following themes:
• Strategy execution and projects
• Tactical orientation, programmes and benefit realisation
• Project environment, uncertainty and complexity
• Project leadership, capabilities and competences.
• Answers have following been clustered and quantified to draw conclusions.

Contact Mannaz

If you would like to learn more about the survey or how Mannaz can support your organisation in Project Leadership please contact:

Client Director Henrik Bjerregaard Nielsen
Tel.: +45 4517 6259.
Email: hbn@mannaz.com