Strategic Planning & Vision Flashcards

An organization wants to ensure its project portfolio directly contributes to shareholder value. Which framework explicitly links operational metrics to financial value drivers?

Answer: Value driver tree

A value driver tree decomposes financial goals into operational levers, showing how improvements in project performance flow through to shareholder or stakeholder value.

When a project controls team uses 'hoshin kanri' (policy deployment), the primary goal is to:

Answer: Cascade strategic goals through all organizational levels to align daily work

Hoshin kanri is a strategic planning method that aligns the entire organization—from executives to front-line workers—around a small number of breakthrough objectives.

Which of the following best describes the relationship between strategy and project controls?

Answer: Project controls provide the data and systems needed to ensure projects deliver strategic outcomes on time and within cost

Project controls generate the performance data—earned value, forecasts, risk exposure—that allow leadership to verify strategic benefits are being realized.

A project controls professional reviews a portfolio and finds that 70% of projects are incremental improvements while only 5% are breakthrough innovations. This analysis relates to which strategic planning concept?

Answer: Portfolio balance across innovation horizons

McKinsey's 'Three Horizons' framework recommends balancing portfolios across incremental, adjacent, and transformational innovation to sustain long-term growth.

During a strategic planning workshop, the facilitator asks participants to identify assumptions that must hold true for the strategy to succeed. This technique is known as:

Answer: Assumption-based planning

Assumption-based planning explicitly surfaces key premises underlying a strategy so teams can monitor them and trigger contingency plans if they prove false.

Which project selection method assigns scores to projects based on how well they satisfy multiple strategic criteria and then ranks them by total score?

Answer: Weighted scoring model

A weighted scoring model allows organizations to rate projects against several strategic criteria (each with assigned weights) and rank them by composite score.

An organization's strategic plan calls for a 20% reduction in capital project cost overruns within three years. The project controls function should respond by:

Answer: Developing metrics, tools, and training to improve estimating accuracy and change control

Improving estimating accuracy and strengthening change control processes are the primary project controls levers for sustainably reducing cost overruns across a portfolio.