Reflecting on my top 5 university modules — Part 1: Business Strategy

If you saw my post last week, I'm doing a five-part series on the modules from my Level 6 Project Management Degree Apprenticeship at Northumbria University that actually changed how I work. Not a textbook review — just what stuck, what I use, and what I'd tell someone starting out.

Starting with the big one: Business Strategy for Project Professionals.

Strategy is someone else's job. Right?

Now I know what you're thinking, "Harrison talking about business strategy? The lad who's been making Gantt charts and chasing people for updates for the last four years?" Yeah. Fair. But hear me out.

Before this module, I genuinely thought strategy was someone else's job. Boardroom stuff. Senior leadership away days where people move sticky notes around and call it a vision. My job was to deliver projects; take the brief, manage the work, don't let anything catch fire (or at least put the fires out before anyone notices).

Turns out, that thinking was the ceiling I didn't know I'd built for myself.

The moment things clicked

The moment things clicked was embarrassingly simple: I realised that delivering a project well means absolutely nothing if you don't understand why it exists in the first place. What's the strategic objective behind it? What's the client actually trying to achieve? Where does this piece of work sit in the bigger picture?

Delivering a project well means absolutely nothing if you don't understand why it exists in the first place.

Once I started asking those questions, I couldn't stop. I became that guy in meetings. I'm still that guy in meetings. I'm sorry.

Putting it into practice

I started applying it straight away on my flagship account. Up until that point, the account had been operating in a pretty transactional way in the sense of, client sends a requirement, we build it, send it back, invoice, done. Rinse and repeat. It worked, but it was limited and honestly, a bit boring.

So from my learning and genuine curiosity, I started pushing to understand the client's strategy, their objectives, where they were actually trying to get to. Instead of waiting to be told what to build, we started turning up with suggestions and clear guidance. Challenging scope. Asking whether what they were requesting was actually what they needed and why. My favourite question is "why?".

The goal was to shift us from being a pair of hands to a genuine value partnership.

That's still a work in progress, but the intent behind it came directly from this module.

Learning from the best

I was also lucky enough to sit down with Richard Coates, Managing Director at Whitecap Consulting, who led a strategic consultancy engagement with CDS. I basically interrogated the poor bloke for over an hour. He walked me through decisions that were made, ones that weren't, and more importantly, why. I reckon I asked "why" about fifty times. He was very patient and honestly, an absolute expert in the field.

If you're on the same degree or doing anything similar, I'd genuinely recommend seeking out conversations like that — the classroom content is valuable, but pairing it with real insight from practitioners is where it really lands.

More to come in Part 2. If you want to chat about any of this — find me on LinkedIn.