Introduction: The Resource Strategy and the Implementation Imperative

This section provides insight into the link between an organisaton’s ability to successfully implement strategies to build a viable organisation over time and its resource strategy. A resource strategy clarifies how an organisation will acquire, develop, and use its resources (assets and capabilities) to achieve its strategic objectives, as outlined in the corporate strategy, which is informed by its financial, customer value creation, resource, and non-market strategies. The five chapters in this section demonstrate that the resource strategy, and the many resource-related (sub)strategies it generates or stimulates, is integral for ensuring an organisation’s people can work well together and with key stakeholders, knowledge is shared effectively intra- and inter-organisationally, and across projects, sound project and governance practices and systems are established, and a positive culture, where one’s talents are valued, supported by a fit-for-purpose talent management system, as well as suitable diversity and inclusion policies and initiatives, takes hold, among other things. Taken together, the five chapters clarify how the organisation’s resource strategy is integral to implementing the many strategies that make up the corporate strategy. A well-designed resource strategy enables the organisation to purposefully use its assets and capabilities, and supports the development of dynamic capabilities, as well as the further development of its operational capabilities. By emphasising the intermediate yet crucial role that the lower-level strategies the resource strategy generates or stimulates play, this section demonstrates how an implementable suite of (sub)strategies, as part of the resource strategy, can be developed to improve the organisation’s future prospects. A framework is developed in this chapter that practitioners and scholars can use to understand what is involved here and to apply, as they see fit, for their own purposes.