From: http://www.bizjournals.com/

Strategic projects are critical in every business sector, and having the right kind of leaders is necessary for your projects to achieve their full potential. There are three critical factors that organizations need when it comes to leadership.

1. Strategic capabilities: The talent triangle

To be successful in today’s increasingly complex and competitive global marketplace, senior executives and their organizations need project, program, and portfolio managers with an equally complex set of capabilities.

This is the “talent triangle,” which is characterized by technical project management proficiency, leadership, and business/strategy acumen.

About 75 percent of organizations rank project management leadership skills as most important for the successful navigation of complexity in projects, according to our research at the Project Management Institute (PMI).

Most organizations consider technical skills the hardest to find but the easiest to teach. As such, global organizations are choosing to hire individuals who demonstrate more nuanced skills in such leadership areas as stakeholder communication, negotiation, and collaboration/analysis — and then train them on the technical side.

A strategic approach is equally essential. Alignment of project talent to organizational strategy produces a dramatically higher average project success rate: 72 percent for those organizations with good alignment compared to 58 percent for those without it, according to PMI research.

2. Stakeholder communication

There are a number of critical strategies that project teams must implement to create engagement and ensure successful follow-through. An often overlooked strategy is stakeholder communication. The way project teams identify and engage with stakeholders from the start of the project determines the degree to which stakeholders commit to the project objective.

Engaging with stakeholders should be a delicate and methodical process that starts early in the process. Project teams should be speaking with all stakeholders to obtain viewpoints and then create an action plan to ensure the project’s success.

3. Knowledge transfer

Knowledge — how it is acquired, used, and shared — is key to project and program success. Yet it is rare to find organizations that do this effectively.

Over the last several decades, our economy has moved to a knowledge-based one in which it is essential for organizations to protect this unique and essential asset. Knowledge transfer is becoming increasingly important in the context of an aging professional population. When organizations create environments where employees can effectively transfer what they know, strategic initiatives are completed more successfully.

Organizations need to have clear plans for transferring essential information from the most experienced, high-performing employees to others responsible for implementing strategic initiatives. Organizations then see improved results across the range of project metrics, including cost savings, time-on-task, error rates, and innovative solutions.

Project management, including the role it plays in achieving organizational success, requires having leaders who understand the significance of project talent, engaging with stakeholders and committing to knowledge transfer.