Recognition of the strategic importance of project management in the corporate world is rapidly accelerating. One reason for this acceleration maybe a strong belief by business leaders that aligning project management with business strategy can significantly enhance the achievement of organizational goals, strategies, and performance. However, empirical literature that offers advice on how to achieve this alignment is scanty. Many companies are suffering from misaligned projects and a lack of a systematic approach to align project management with the business strategy. Although projects are the basic building blocks of organizational strategy in many companies, project management is not often recognized as a functional strategy and is rarely perceived as a business process, making the achievement of a project management/business strategy alignment even more difficult. This study addresses three aspects of an under-researched topic in the strategic management literature—aligning project management with business strategy. An empirically based theoretical framework was developed to highlight the impact of business strategy on project management (and vice-versa) and the mechanisms used to strengthen that alignment, whereas the alignment scores were calculated to quantitatively complement data from the field study. Multiple sources of data were utilized to triangulate emerging information for eight case studies covering nine projects in seven organizations (42 interviews).
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