How to Pick the Right Projects to Drive Strategy Forward

The hardest part of strategy execution isn’t writing the strategy, it’s choosing what to actually do about it. Most organizations have too many initiatives running in parallel, each claiming to advance something important. But when everything becomes a priority, nothing is a priority. Picking the right projects is the real test of strategic maturity. It’s where big aspirations meet limited resources. This is not merely about filtering ideas but about deciding where progress will be most meaningful.

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Start from the Strategy

This cannot be stressed enough. A clear strategy is a pre-requisite for any project. Our recommendation is "No Strategy, No Project". Only when you have a clear strategy, can you judge whether a project supports it or not. For more on strategy, refer to this article here.

Anchor in Strategic Themes

Every strategy, no matter how complex, can be distilled into a few categories such as expansion, efficiency, innovation, resilience, capability building. These categories or themes should act as filters. When new ideas surface, test them against these themes. If a proposal doesn’t clearly advance one, it’s either premature or irrelevant right now. This prevents drift, where teams start chasing operational improvements that are “nice to have” but not vital to the strategy.

Clarify What “Progress” Actually Means

Strategies often get lost in abstraction. “Enhance customer experience” or “drive innovation” sound inspiring but provide little direction for selecting projects. Translate these ideas into concrete outcomes like reduced churn, faster onboarding, new product adoption, stronger retention. When progress is measurable, choosing the right projects becomes easier. You’re no longer debating opinions, you’re weighing evidence.

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Evaluate Impact, Effort, and Relevance

Turning strategy into action requires filters that help you decide what to fund and what to defer. In Tesoract you will find that ideas are evaluated on the three aspects of impact, effort and relevance.

Impact answers the question, "how strongly will this move the business towards its strategic goals?"

‍Effort refers to the time, budget and talent will this require.

Relevance helps evaluate whether this idea aligns with our current capability, maturity and culture? 

Every project pitch sounds good on paper. Bring in data early, customer pain points, internal process data, or pilot results to ground the discussion. It’s far better to eliminate a weak project early on than after six months of execution fatigue.

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Focus on Few, Good Projects

Regardless of how promising they are, if every project is taken up, your organization risks spreading too thin.

The Power of Constraint

Limiting the number of active projects is a sign of focus. When leaders try to drive too many parallel priorities, attention fragments. Teams get stuck managing dependencies instead of delivering projects. Fewer initiatives done well create more momentum than dozens of scattered efforts.

Balance Between Building and Performing

Some projects strengthen today’s performance, reducing cost, improving reliability, speeding up delivery. Others build tomorrow’s advantage, developing a new capability, system, or product foundation. A healthy project portfolio balances both. Too much “performance” work keeps you efficient but stagnant. Too much “building” work slows results before new value appears.

A quarterly or at least a half yearly review of the portfolio helps keep this balance intact.

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Make Ownership and Governance Real

One Project, One Owner

Every project needs a single accountable leader, not a committee, not a rotating chair. This person’s role is not to do everything but to ensure decisions are made, trade-offs are visible, communicated, and blockers are cleared. Unclear accountability is one of the fastest ways to drain energy from strategy execution.

Governance that Guides, Not Polices

Steering committees often turn into reporting rituals. The better version is a governance cadence that looks forward, not backward. Set a rhythm for check-ins that ask, "What’s changed? What are we learning? Do we still believe in the business case?" This keeps projects adaptive without letting them drift.

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Visibility Is the Hidden Multiplier

The best strategies fail quietly when they’re not translated into everyday work. Visibility drives ownership and accountability.

Keep Strategy in View

When teams can see how their work connects to strategy, alignment stops being something leaders have to enforce. It becomes self-sustaining. Strategic projects shouldn’t live in hidden spreadsheets or private trackers. They should be visible in dashboards, team meetings, and internal conversations. That’s where Tesoract changes the game, it makes strategic progress visible across teams. Instead of updates buried in slides, progress becomes part of how people work day-to-day.

Learn, Don't Judge

Visibility and transparency isn’t about policing, but about creating shared context. When everyone sees what’s working and what isn’t learning compounds faster. Over time, decision quality improves, not because everything is perfect, but because the organization is learning and adapting.

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Keep Adapting as Context Shifts

Strategy Is a Moving Target. The projects that are right today may not be right six months from now. Market shifts, customer needs, and internal capabilities all evolve. A static project list becomes outdated quickly. Build review cycles into your operating rhythm, quarterly is often enough to decide which projects continue, pivot, or stop. Stopping a project that’s no longer strategic isn’t failure but discipline. The goal is to keep the organization pointed toward impact, not to defend sunk costs.

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Strategy = What You Choose to Do

No strategy document communicates strategy as clearly as your actions do. The projects you choose to do and equally importantly, the ones you don’t, reveal your true strategy. Choosing well means being deliberate, informed, and willing to say no. Execution ultimately, is the art of focus.

At Tesoract, we help PMO leaders practice that discipline, bringing clarity to what matters most, and systems that make progress visible and manageable. Book a call with us to learn more.