How to increase revenue and profitability through strategic project management

Unless you’re working on a billionaire’s passion project, you’re likely under pressure to deliver tangible business results. For most organizations, that means one thing: hitting revenue targets. Yet, 70% fall short. 

Why? Not (always) because the ideas are flawed, but because of a gap between high-level business goals and the projects designed to achieve them. In other words, misalignment between strategy and execution.

Strategic projects aren’t just large or high-budget initiatives. They’re deliberate investments designed to support core business objectives. Whether expanding into a new market, launching critical new products, or accelerating innovation, every strategic initiative should be grounded in its potential to generate measurable financial return.

This alignment with overarching objectives should ensure that execution efforts aren’t happening in silos.

Project teams that understand how their work ties into broader revenue goals are more focused, accountable, and ultimately deliver more profitable outcomes—research of 410 organizations across 8 sectors revealed that aligned companies grow their revenue 58% faster and are 78% more profitable than their peers.

How to improve revenue generation: A 4-step process

If you know of a magic wand recipe for wealth, success, and goal realization, you could probably make a fortune by launching your own masterclass. For the rest of us, here is a set of four time-tested, industry-proven best practices for growing your revenue and achieving your targets through strategic projects.

1. Translate strategic goals into executable projects

The first step in driving revenue through projects is to translate business strategy into actionable initiatives. This requires breaking down broader goals into focused, prioritized projects that teams can own and deliver.

Start by defining your key goals and objectives. Once clear, we can map initiatives to them. Are you aiming to:

• pivot your business model to embrace new market conditions?
  • Strategic goal: boost revenue stability by transitioning to a recurring revenue model, rather than relying on one-time purchases
  • Project: develop a billing and subscription management system
• accelerate market penetration?
  • Strategic goal: expand market share by 15% in a new geographic area within the next 12 months
  • Project: localize product features, language, and support based on regional needs
• streamline internal operations to improve margins?
  • Strategic goal: increase profit margin by 5% through improved operational efficiency
  • Project: automate invoice processing systems to reduce labor costs and billing errors

Prioritization is critical. Not every good idea deserves immediate attention. Use structured frameworks to assess which projects offer the greatest revenue impact relative to cost, complexity, and timeline. 

Some popular prioritization techniques and approaches include:

• impact vs. effort matrix, which focuses on those high-impact, low-effort “quick wins”
• RICE scoring, where projects are ranking according to Reach, Impact, Confidence, and Effort
• MoSCoW, which categorizes initiatives into Must-have, Should-have, Could-have, and Won’t have
• weighted scoring, which involves scoring projects against criteria such as strategic alignment, revenue, and risk

Cut through the “noise”: strategic execution demands a laser-like focus on your strategic goals, balancing impact with feasibility.

For example, when the pandemic hit, the credit union WSECU introduced a Quarterly Business Review (QBR) process, where leaders could ask:

• Are we focused on the right work?
• Do we have the resources to execute?
• Will this initiative make a real impact?

The results? They cut 35% of projects in just one review, freeing up resources for higher-priority work.

2. Establish metrics that connect projects to revenue

A strategic project is only as valuable as its ability to drive measurable outcomes. That’s why it’s essential to identify and track the right metrics from the outset. The right metrics are the KPIs and OKRs that directly or indirectly improve revenue generation.

Think beyond basic output measures like tasks completed or deadlines met. Instead, build a performance map that links project deliverables to revenue-driving indicators. These might include:

• Lead conversion
• Customer retention
• Sales cycles
• R&D tax credits
• Up-sell/cross-sell rates

The list is virtually endless, as it all depends on the kind, size, model, and even brand image of your specific business. 

In any case, after defining your key metrics, creating a visual KPI tree can help teams see the cascade effect from their work—how their individual project outputs impact KPIs and affect bottom-line outcomes.

By embedding these metrics into project plans, you ensure that execution stays tightly aligned with what matters most: achieving revenue and profitability targets.

For an illustration of how a performance map can link project metrics to revenue, let’s take the example of a clinical research organization operating in life sciences.

• Strategic goal: increase clinical trial efficiency and data quality
  • Project: automate clinical trial data capture using an electronic data capture system
    • Project metric 1: Data entry error rate
    • Project metric 2: Percentage of queries auto-resolved
    • Project metric 3: User adoption rate across sites
    • Project metric 4: Training time per user on new system

Achieving these metrics leads to shorter trial duration, a larger number of concurrent trials, and improved client satisfaction. These directly link to revenue through faster trial completions, reduced costs per trial, and greater customer retention.

3. Enable cross-functional execution

Once metrics are defined, the “real” work begins: execution. Success at this stage depends not just on doing the work, but on how the work gets done across the organization.

Strategic projects often cut across multiple departments: development, sales, marketing, product, operations, you name it. That’s why establishing clear governance is non-negotiable. To improve revenue generation, each project must have defined ownership, roles, responsibilities, timelines, and checkpoints.

Achieving this level of alignment helps resolve roadblocks faster, frees up the flow of communication, and enhances agility in decision-making. The more cohesive and coordinated the execution, the more likely the project will deliver measurable value.

As we explore in more detail in another article, promoting cross-functional teamwork should focus on culture (clearly defining roles, responsibilities, and communication protocols), process (promoting a collaborative mindset), and technology (leveraging robust team collaboration tools).

Improving revenue with cross-team collaboration: Real-world examples

Take Woodward: This leading aerospace and defense company managing 5,000+ projects reduced inefficiencies by 75% by bridging communication gaps and overcoming deep operational silos across global business units.

This enabled real-time information sharing, stronger cross-departmental alignment and more agile decision-making—a cultural transformation that ultimately benefitted Woodward's bottom line.

Teva, a global pharmaceutical leader, is another example of an organization who realized similar operational benefits by embracing more cross-team integration and collaboration.

They unified 17 fragmented systems and brought global teams into one shared system and source of truth, aligning decisionmaking across development, regulatory and commercial functions.

This eliminated redundancies and empowered Teva to prioritize the most important opportunities across their many international markets, improving efficiency, agility, project selection, and, of course, revenue.

Johnson & Johnson Medical Devices had a similar story of cross-platform unification, eliminating 14 systems in favor of a single source of truth for all operations.

4. Evaluate and optimize for continuous improvement

To truly drive revenue, strategic projects must be monitored, evaluated, and optimized continuously. Contrary to common belief, course correction is a sign of strength—not failure.

PMOs should regularly assess performance against defined metrics and conduct structured post-project reviews to capture lessons learned and measure ROI. Key questions may include:

• are projects hitting their targets?
• are they influencing the business in the expected ways?
• if not, why?
• what contributed to success? What created friction? 

In another article, we’ve listed three practical approaches for making process improvement part of your organizational culture. Consider implementing the 5% rule—ask all project team members to spend 5% of their time on improving processes. Small efforts, big impact.

You may want to consider adopting aspects of Agile methodologies, with short feedback loops and monthly or sprint-based check-ins to take stock of learnings. Stakeholder demos and sprint retrospectives make it easy to spot what’s not working and where you can improve next time.

What’s more, documenting these insights improves future project selection and execution, enabling your organization to build a culture of continuous improvement. Those who learn fastest grow fastest.

By ensuring that project retrospectives become a habit, you make process improvement simply part of the job.

Strategic project and portfolio management tools include built-in features and capabilities for supporting PMOs in their campaign for continuous improvement, such as retrospective tracking, KPI dashboards, ‘lessons learned’ repositories, trend analysis, and automated reporting.

Strategy matters—but so does toolset

Achieving revenue targets isn’t just about having a great strategy. It’s about executing the right projects in the right way. 

By aligning execution with business objectives, defining clear revenue-linked metrics, fostering cross-functional accountability, and continuously measuring results, organizations can move from “firefighting” mode to purposeful business growth.

But why go it alone when you can benefit from the power of purpose-built tools like Planisware? Give our strategic portfolio management solution a (free) try and see for yourself. 

Spoiler alert: You’ll love the ROI.