Strategic Change through Projects

Hello. My name is Christoph Loch. I am a Professor of Operations and Technology Management at Cambridge Judge Business School. And for the last 30 years, I’ve worked with companies across various industries but also with nonprofit organisations on issues of innovation, project management, and strategic change.

This programme, Strategic Change Through Projects, is not a project management programme. This programme helps you to develop your ability to manage the surrounding, the organisational environment within which strategic projects are carried out.

So the target participants for this programme are people at the top of the business unit, the CEO, the entire C-suite, the most senior managers, because for them, projects give them the tool and the opportunity to bring strategic change into implementation. And for that, you need to set up your organisation.

One month ago, I went for a trip in China for 2 weeks. And my colleague and I, we worked with 10 business units of market-leading Chinese companies on the question, is your innovation portfolio aligned with your strategy? So we analysed their strategy, including what is their real competitive advantage and where are their weaknesses, and therefore, where do they need to change things?

And that could be products and technologies. But it could also be sales channels. It could be processes. It could be setting up a call centre. So what are the aspects of strategic change in your organisation? And then we looked with them at the projects, the change projects that they were actually undertaking. So we looked at the innovation portfolio.

And in 2/3rds of the cases, when they looked at it that way, they noticed, oh, gosh, it doesn’t fit. And then we worked with them in, A, adjusting the portfolio so it would help them execute their strategy. And in half of the cases, it also induced changes in their strategy itself because from looking at the things that they were actually doing, they realised that there were some opportunities that they hadn’t seen. And there were some real barriers and infeasibilities that they hadn’t quite realised.

That’s what this programme is about. And this journey, this what we did with these companies, we will start with that in the programme. And then we will look at – in order to then get these projects to be successful, we need to set up processes. We need to set up organisational structures. We need to respect the capacity that we have in executing. And we need to put a governance system in place.

So all of these aspects of how do you set up your organisation so it can successfully implement these initiatives– and then the project management comes underneath – that’s what we will discuss in this programme. So there will be a mixture of case studies and discussions and problem-solving and some simulation exercises.

But it all will end up with every day you being asked, what are the ideas from this which actually apply your own organisation? And where might you be able to take actions that make this a reality in your organisation?

So I’ll say a couple of sentences about why Cambridge is actually a good place for you to pursue this. So first of all, Cambridge Judge Business School, where I am not alone in doing this, but we actually have a group of people with a lot of experience who are working with organisations all over the world on these topics. So you all have access to real world-leading experts.

But secondly, Cambridge Judge Business School is embedded in the largest technology cluster in Europe, the Cambridge Cluster. So there will also be an opportunity for you to rub shoulders with tech entrepreneurs. We will have a couple of events. And you will be able to sample some of the really deep technical expertise that exists in Cambridge.