Effective project management for strategic innovation and change in an organizational context

Practicing project management means applying knowledge, techniques, tools, and skills to realize products or services. Practicing project management effectively involves aligning project goals with corporate strategy and organizational objectives, aligning to generate business benefits and realize competitive advantages. This paper examines the relationship between projects and strategy, focusing on the ways organizations align these two practices. In doing so, it discusses the recent literature on this topic and identifies five factors critical to realizing development projects as well as the elements essential for implementing innovation projects. It then analyzes a case study involving RMIT University (Australia) and its effort to develop and implement a distributed learning system, one designed to provide students with more flexible options for learning and RMIT with more innovative initiatives for expanding into the world of Web-based advanced-learning programming.