Strategic management tools in projects case construction project

The important role of using mission, vision and strategy has been acknowledged in most organizations today. Mission is the reason why the organization exists. Vision is the ideal state of the organization in the future. Strategy defines the way of how to get towards the ideal state introduced in the vision. These tools are considered to be very useful in guiding the whole organization into the same direction. Different ways of producing mission, vision and strategy have been developed. In projects, using these tools are still quite rare even though it is acknowledged that projects in an organization should support the overall strategy of the organization. In addition, every project should have a clear direction where to go and this direction should be stated to every stakeholder of the project. In this paper we will discuss the possibilities of using strategic management tools in project environment. A case study is used to illustrate the use of strategic management tools in a construction project. The construction project is still going on, but already now it can be seen that vision building really helped getting the end user organization committed, and they have been very active in all steps of the design process, e.g. given their opinions in different matters. The vision has also been used when prioritizing different choices. © 2007 Elsevier Ltd and IPMA.