ANAO - Planning and Approving Projects

Alignment with corporate goals

Better Practice results: Project proposals contribute to the entity’s corporate goals and program delivery strategies.

The value of alignment:

“A thousand drops of rain falling in one place will wear away the hardest stone. A thousand drops of rain falling by chance are simply pitter-patter.”

… Proverb.

An important aspect of corporate planning is defining an entity’s program delivery strategy. For example, this could involve deciding:

whether programs will be provided in-house or contracted out, and whether they will be delivered via counter service, by phone, mail, or the Internet;
the standards and goals for program delivery – such as decision-making times, or avoiding the need for clients to provide information which they have previously provided; and
the standards and goals for internal service delivery, which enable staff to carry out their program delivery roles – such as providing staff access to an online information portal covering client information, program information, and staff information.

Strategy briefings

“Each year we hold a half day session at the start of the project planning cycle to explain the process, our templates and terminology. We also update everyone on coming changes in emphasis in our program delivery strategy so we encourage line areas to develop proposals that fit in.”

… Agency planning branch head.

Progress toward achieving the program delivery strategy will be assisted if project proposals are developed with the strategy in mind.

It is better practice that entities promote an understanding in executives and those involved in developing project proposals of the practical implications of their program delivery strategy and other relevant policies.

Projects also need to align with a range of other entity and government strategies. Some of these alignments are illustrated below.

Diagram of alignment of project plans to entity and government plans for ICT and program delivery.

Case study: New delivery strategy drives new projects

A national agency with security responsibilities had always worked cooperatively with other jurisdictions. However, changes in the external environment meant that a very significant increase in cross-jurisdictional cooperation, in particular in joint taskforces, would be used in the future. Supporting this change while maintaining proper management control and accountability would require many changes to internal systems and work practices. To support this, there were changes to the ICT strategy and projects for increased ICT storage capacity, specialist data analysis software and training, and changes to accounting and personnel systems.

A project can demonstrate its alignment with corporate goals more easily – and more usefully for decision-makers – if corporate goals include relevant and tangible indicators. These tangible indicators allow projects to specify their measureable contribution to corporate goals, on a consistent basis to other projects.

For example, consider a common, and desirable, high-level goal of ‘Improved client service’. Many projects could assert alignment with this goal. However, assessing the degree of contribution – and hence relative merit – of a project to a broadly phrased goal is uncertain. This uncertainty can be reduced if the high-level goal is supplemented by measurable indicators and targets, such as: ‘Reduce average decision-making time from 4 days to 1 day’.

An example of two projects demonstrating their specific contribution to tangible improvement targets for a corporate goal is provided below.⁸

Diagram showing how projects make a tangible contribution to corporate goals.

8: In practice, setting useful targets for goals generally involves clearly defining an indicator (sometimes called a metric) for the goal, measuring current performance of that indicator, and setting a specific improvement target for a nominated time period. These steps then allow confidence in the assessment of performance improvements.

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