Strategic Project Archetypes for Effective Project Steering

The ability to use the project work form tends to be increasingly important for long-term profitability in most organizations, thus, strategic management nowadays normally comprises management of projects and project portfolios. Many significant decisions concerning the organization's vision, goals and operations origins from a few basic questions in a strategic perspective. Some of these are related to developing a strategic position: Which products should we offer? How can we retain old customers and attract new ones? How can we increase our internal efficiency? The answers to these questions often results in decisions to initiate projects for product development, marketing campaigns or internal improvements. Other projects are related to operating from an established strategic position: delivering customer orders and producing events. The purpose of this paper is to describe and discuss a project typology, derived from a strategic management perspective. The typology consists of five project archetypes: Product development projects, Marketing projects, Internal improvement projects, Customer order projects, and Event projects. The typology highlights distinctive characteristics in the result perspective, i.e. variations in project deliverables, goals and intended effects, which have significant consequences for business oriented project steering in practice. Variations between project archetypes are described focusing on business decision processes, the purpose and content of project phases, progress control/follow-up, and organizational principles. The typology represents one of three analysis models in a framework for Structured Project Analysis (the SPA framework) developed during a doctoral study 2004-2009.