From plan to action

Sustainable growth is dependent on delivering good strategies in the right way. However, this is something that organizations appear ill-equipped to do. By examining what causes the gap between strategy and operations and the way, it can be executed. As a business leader, you need to answer ten essential questions for their strategies to create the leap from design to delivery effectively.

1. Is delivery as significant to you as designing?

Strategy design may be an exciting procedure. It is cerebral, dependent on marshaling facts and characters, opinions and views, hunches and hints. It's demanding, challenging, and vitally important, but without execution, it's nothing.

In a 2017 Economist Intelligence Unit worldwide survey of 500 senior corporate executives, more than 90 percent declared they failed to reach all of their strategic goals because of faulty implementation to the tactical or operational level.

2. Management level take responsibility for delivery too?

As soon as you have defined and conveyed the strategy, your responsibility shifts to tracking implementation. You want to understand where your business change happens and who oversees the programs that drive change. You proactively address emerging challenges and gaps that may impact delivery. Without this subject, your strategy has little probability of succeeding.

3. Do you mobilize the proper resources?

Consulting companies and much more fluid businesses are proficient at ensuring their very best individuals are working on the projects that require them most. In contrast, hierarchical and other organizational structures may restrict mobility, and many businesses struggle to discharge their most delicate heads to become involved with implementing key approaches. "Always put your very best talent on critical initiatives and make sure you reward them accordingly, but more importantly ensure that they are going to have roles after the completion of the assignment," advises David Marlow, company transformation lead at Bristol-Myers Squibb, at his article (page 55 of this Strategy@Work publication )[1]

4. Do you leverage penetration on customers and competitors?

Organizations atrophy when they lose touch with their customers, whereas the top leaders are constantly trying to find insights from clients and competitors. From the EIU survey, 53 percent of employers said that changing customer expectations/demands impeded implementation. Because of this, the majority monitored customer trends. But only one in five reported having powerful feedback loops to use all this data in strategy delivery. In a Harvard Business Review article, Amy Edmondson and Paul Verdin argue that client input - at all phases - is a vital section of strategy and implementation. It generates what they call"strategy as studying."

5. Is your execution bold, concentrated, and as easy as possible?

Delivery is complicated - often worldwide, always interconnected. To be successful, the constant emphasis must be on boldness, focus, and simplicity. The Boston Consulting Group talks of"smart simplicity." This involves enabling individuals satisfactorily for the needs of their projects by giving them the proper resources, removing unnecessary constraints, and aligning interests by impacts to actions and outcomes.

6. Do you promote team engagement and cross-business cooperation?

Support and comprehension of the strategy throughout the organization: Middle and line supervisors have to be committed and activated as strategy champions rather than just supervisors and managers. In the EIU survey, 62 percent of respondents said that the absence of buy-in from middle managers, line supervisors, or both established a significant barrier to strategy implementation at their organizations.

Secondly, the understanding that teams are how approaches are delivered. The Boston Consulting Group identifies performance integrity. This is means a highly motivated and thoughtful endeavor team with a bias for action, apparent on its aims, with a solid leader and sufficient member tools, plus the perfect mixture of skills for the effort.

7. Do you own the decisions that you make?

Commit to making tactical decisions quickly. Move fast to correct path, reprioritize, and remove roadblocks. Accept that you probably won't have all of the information you need and rely upon those you can trust to deliver adequate, reliable input to allow thoughtful decisions. Consider and address risks and interdependencies explicitly-equally upfront and frequently throughout delivery. Construct a lean and powerful governance structure to reinforce responsibility, ownership, and a bias in actions, dependent on agreed metrics and milestones.

8. Do you assess continuing campaigns before start committing to new initiatives?

Organizations are used to overburden people with strategic initiatives of one kind or another, creating change fatigue. You need to evaluate your portfolio of strategic initiatives regularly. Add new efforts in response to new opportunities, but be sure you know both the current portfolio and your organization's ability to deliver change. Agility, the organizational capability to swiftly adapt strategy in response to external and internal adjustments, plays an essential part in the government and direction of any portfolio of strategic initiatives.

9. Can you create robust plans but let for missteps?

We live on fast-moving occasions. Even the many far-reaching and complex approaches must contain room for studying and realignment. Strategy planning cycles are somewhat more fast, dynamic, and agile than previously. Delivery teams need to experiment and learn in an environment in which it's safe to neglect fast. In practice, this usually means that you have to openly discuss challenges and adjust the strategy as necessary for achievement. Learn how to reward failure, or at least accept it as a precious input.

In agile organizations, it's not uncommon to have regular interactions between leaders and teams to examine and realize what went wrong, what worked well, and what has to be enhanced. It is a solid iterative process. This isn't merely about communicating; it's about interaction up, down, and round the business.

Interestingly, what seems to be evolving is acceptance of the need for a hybrid strategy to strategy. The purpose is to manage the current company and operations while seeking out the upcoming disruptive idea. This is sometimes observed in Volkswagen Group based on the record (page 23, second pillar ). The corporation's chief strategy officer Thomas Sedran talks of a"two-speed organization" -"One part goes with proven procedures that lead to reliable products. This is essential for those developing vehicles since delivering a dangerous one may cost one of the corporations. For another hand, in which you will need to be much faster, but where the effects of a collapse are not as intense, you want to be agile and have different planning and implementation processes."

10. Can you celebrate victory and recognize those who have done good work?

Success in businesses is often whispered rather than celebrated. If strategy delivery eventually becomes embedded in any organizational culture, hits must be broadly and wildly renowned. It's notable how proficient the best business leaders are at acknowledging outstanding achievements. They developed a personal means of spreading the company great function - a handwritten note, a phone call.

Any boss who can answer the following ten questions in the affirmative is well placed to translate strategy into delivery. Even neglecting to deal with the issues raised by a few of the inquiries can handicap even the most brilliant strategy.

References:

[1]https://bbf.digital/the-new-era-of-transforming-strategies

[2] Ivan Moreira, “Author bio”: https://ivanmoreira.org/about

[3]Photo by John Schnobrich on Unsplash

[4]Photo by Bruce Mars on Unsplash

Note and Disclaimer: The author of this Blog post is Ivan Moreira, PMP®. He is the guest author of PMI.hu. The writing reflects the author's own professional opinion, findings, and conclusions, which do not necessarily agree with the position of PMI Budapest, Hungarian Chapter, and cannot be considered as an official recommendation, resolution, or opinion of PMI Budapest. The copyright and publication rights of the writing belong to the original author.