Aligning fire safety projects to organization's strategic objectives

Author Reference

Benard., L., (2014): How fire safety projects are aligned to organization’s strategic objective. Intel Fire Group Blog. Nairobi, Kenya.

How fire safety projects are aligned to the organization’s strategic objectives

Organization’s strategic objectives as defined in their strategic plan, whether the 3-year or 5-plan, defines only one thing, the direction to which the organization moving in achieving its mission and by extension the vision of the founders of the organization. In order therefore to ensure that every project in an organization are geared towards this achievement, the project officers needs to ensure that the projects are aligned to the strategic objectives. There should be a clear understanding of how these projects contributes to the achievement of the strategic objectives and a criteria put in place to identify the priority of projects.

Strategic objectives

Whereas the organization’s vision tend to be quite broad and can be described as the goals, the strategic objectives is defined according to the online business dictionary (2014) as that which the organization must achieve in order to make its strategy a success. In order to align fire safety projects to the organization’s strategy it is prudent to recognize that these strategies according to Drucker (1994) are categorized into eight groups. These groups includes (1) Market standing: Which is the fire station’s desired share of present and future jurisdiction; (2) Innovation: The fire stations’ development of new products and services, and the skills and methods required to implement them; (3) Human resources: selection and development of fire staff; (4) Financial resources: identification of the sources of capital and their use; (5) Physical resources: fire safety equipment and facilities and their applications; (6) Productivity: efficient use of the fire safety resources relative to output; (7) Social responsibility: awareness and responsive to the effects on the wider community of the stakeholders; (8) Profit requirements: Even though most public fire stations are non-profit oriented, there must be achievement of measurable financial well-being and growth.

Example

An institution may have one of its strategic objectives stated as “Institutional Capacity building” which is contributing to its vision and mission. According to Drucker (1994), this strategic objective is in place in order to achieve the “Human Resource” strategy.

Aligning

George (2009) indicates that in aligning fire safety projects to the strategic goals and objectives, the fire safety project strategist must look at the project’s contribution to the vision and mission of the organization with a broad perspective on the major goals and objectives. In the above example, if for example the below projects are undertaken, then they will be contributing to the strategic objective “Institutional Capacity Building”

STRATEGIC OBJECTIVE: Institutional Capacity Building
1.	Training Branch Managers
2.	Team building organized for the year 2014
3.	Motivational talks for year 2014

In reference to the above table therefore, the fire safety projects which entails training branch managers; team building organized for the station in the year 2014; and motivational talks for the same year, all contributes to the strategic objective “Institutional capacity building”. It also necessary to note that studies in project management have not conclusively come up with a standard structure and method to align projects to the organizations’ strategic objectives; therefore, at this point in time these studies are still under review by scholars around the world.

Reference

Drucker, P. F. (1994). "The Theory of the Business". Harvard Business Review (September–October 1994).

George., B., (2009), How to align projects with Organizanal Strategic Objectives. Allpine.com. Accessed 29 Nov. 2014