ABSTRACT
An important study sponsored by the Project Management Institute as a part of its 2013 Thought Leadership series defined a strategic initiative as 'a project, portfolio of projects, other discrete programme or series of actions undertaken to implement or continue the execution of a strategy, or that is otherwise essential for the successful implementation or execution of a strategy. This includes some projects, but does not entail the entire project portfolio'. Strategic initiatives often affect many different divisions, functions or regions within an organization, and thus the controls and processes used to manage and implement them need to be common to all the different units involved. A particular aspect of the socio-political complexity involved in many strategic initiatives is that they themselves are embedded within an organization, like cuckoos’ eggs in a nest. The systems established to run the business often clash horribly with the systems in place to run the organization.
