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Making strategy happen
What would be the impact of getting your strategy implemented across your entire organisation? Malcolm Wicks – Three Step Consulting Setting the financial and other goals that you want to achieve is often the easy bit. Creating a strategy to achieve the goals is a bit harder, but the toughest challenge for most organisations is actually implementing the strategy. In fact over 70% of strategies fail to get implemented. This paper provides some key pointers on implementing strategy but focuses on the benefits to be gained from a successful implementation. Why have a strategy? A strategy provides consistent direction to achieve the organisations top goals and optimizes the use of resources. It also helps everyone make decisions and explain why they made them. Why doesn’t strategy get implemented? Often senior management teams regard creating the strategy as the hard bit. They then delegate implementation to their managers but provide little background on how the strategy was determined and limited direction on how to execute it. This is a big problem because many operational managers have not had the experience or training to know how to successfully implement and use a strategy. When an implementation hits problems some organisations blame thequality of the strategy and seek to review or rewrite it. Reviewing andrewriting can go on and on, hence it’s one of the top reasons whystrategies don’t get implemented. Interestingly our own research and personal experiences tell us that the quality of the strategy has surprisingly little to do with the ability of an organisation to implement it. The third reason to consider is that the team who created the strategyoften doesn’t have enough knowledge of existing processes and the potential impact on staff. The size of the gap from where things are today and where the strategy wants them to be is often significantly underestimated in terms of scale and consequences. The greatest blocks to implementing strategy are existing processes or ways of doing things and the reactions of people. What does a successful strategy look like? One of the hallmarks of successful strategies is that they are short. That makes them easy to read and remember. They also need to be tightly linked to the overall goals of the organisation and credible. Everyone in the organisation should be able to believe that the strategy is both logical and achievable as well as a good strategy. Even more importantly they need to understand their role in implementing the strategy. Every implementation of strategy needs a roll out plan. What will be achieved by when and by whom? This makes tracking progress easier and allows implementation to be broken down into smaller more manageable activities. We recommend making as much of this implementation plan as possible widely available to all members of staff. This acts as a motivator for their actions as well enabling them to understand what is going on and to contribute their knowledge and expertise where appropriate. Top management support is of course essential but that support also has to extend to implementation. This includes providing guidance and suitable expertise/training to help managers implement. One of the most time consuming parts is regularly communicating with staff about what the strategy is and how well, or not, the implementation is progressing. We advise top management to expect that communications will take more than twice as much of their time as they thought that it would take. One of our favorite tests of a good strategy is to ask “what would be thereaction if you showed it to your customers?” Would they regard it as helpful to them, sensible, smart and good? Some customer focused businesses share significant chunks of their strategies directly with customers and partners already. (Several of our other white papers go into more detail on how to develop and implement strategy.) Benefits of implementing a joined up strategy The primary purpose of a strategy is to enable the top goals of the organisation to be met. A well implemented strategy will also have many other impacts across the organisation. They range from reducing costs and growing profits to improving processes and making people happier and more effective in what they do. The impact on people Understanding the needs, measurements and motivations of other departments. In many organisations this is biggest single benefit in terms of cost savings and the speed up of processes. We have seen many examples of key process times cut from weeks to days or even hours. Reductions or redeployment of resources, particularly those employed to handle the anomalies, can also be significant. People want and need direction. Organisations that provide direction through clearly implemented strategies have more motivated staff that stay with the company longer. The more that staff believe that they are able to influence strategy or its implementation the more successful the implementation will be. More consistent decision making. A major problem in most organisations is that they do not make consistent decision across the entire organisation or even across the same department. This often incurs considerable costs. The implemented strategy will reduce costs as well as frustrations. People influence people. Once a certain tipping point is reached the implementation of strategy becomes self policing. Staff will question one another about what they are doing and how it fits with the strategy. Less time wasting meetings. Having a strategy and plan to refer to cuts short meetings where a lot of time was spent discussing opinions or options. Thinking company. The more that people understand the strategy and their role in it the easier it is for them to think about the impact of what they do on the whole company and not just their department. We also encourage the “buddy” system between totally unrelated departments as part of developing departmental goals and strategies. Commercial and Sales awareness. The expose to strategy implementation and the opportunity to receive appropriate supportive training enables staff to become much commercially and sales aware. The impact of telling people how much things cost can be extremely significant. The impact on processes Sensible organisations. In many businesses the implementation of strategy has resulted in changes to the organisational structure. It doesn’t always mean reducing the number of staff but it frequently means reducing the number of separate departments and realigning goals and responsibilities. Cutting through departmental barriers. Most processes have been developed by departments for themselves. The implementation of a strategy through the strategic touch points of the organisation highlights disconnects between the processes of different departments. Common goals and metrics. We believe that companies need a very limited number of goals and metrics or they will loose focus. Strategy implementation helps define what the key metrics are and which existing metrics don’t add value. Focus and prioritisation. The strategy helps determine what is most important and what is not important. Service level agreements (SLA’s) between departments. In addition to common goals we have developed a very simple method of using SLA’s & RACI’s to clarify roles and responsibilities between departments. They are key tool to reduce conflict and speed up processes. The impact on customers In addition to benefiting key financial, process and people aspects of an organisation the implemented strategy should have a beneficial impact on customers. If it doesn’t think seriously about why you are doing it. Conclusion Getting a good strategy developed and implemented provides an enormous range of benefits to organisations. We have highlighted some of them in this paper but the most satisfaction will come from the unexpected benefits that you discover as you implement your own strategy. Good luck. Malcolm Wicks Three Step Consulting Malcolm.Wicks@3sc.co.uk WWW.3sc.co.uk 0118 989 1107 0781 394 6021
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