Consider the following facts about Business Strategy:
- Most organizations don’t differentiate between ‘Goals’ & ‘Strategies’. They are interchangeably used
- While 80% of organizations have 3 year ‘Goals’ they hardly have any defined strategy!
- 80 % of all organizations which have a well defined strategies, fail to execute them well
- Less than 5 % of employees understand an organization’s business strategy
- Only senior management staff’s incentives are linked to business strategy
- More than half of organizations don’t synchronize their business strategy to budget
Source: Large Research Organizations & Consulting firms such as Wharton , Renaissance Consulting,etc
Large enterprises are no way better than the smaller ones. In fact, most large enterprise have a well-crafted business strategy, but they fail in Execution!
How can we help you?
We focus equally on Strategic Plan Creation & Execution. Thus we stay engaged throughout the year and facilitate seamless execution of strategy rather than submit a strategic document and leave the execution to you.
We primarily use Hoshin Kanri approach (‘X’ Matrix & 3 page format) for strategic deployment, but we can customize it to suit existing practices within your organization.
- Plan and Facilitate Strategic Annual Planning Workshop
- Interview key stakeholders
- Preparatory research on customer feedback, competition, past performance, etc
- Facilitate the creation of SWOT
- Mesh Customer Priorities & Competition offering through Customer Snake Plots
- Establish Measures of Success for Goals Year-on-Year
- Derive meaningful and executable strategies from strategy elements
- Catch ball on ownership, metrics & targets
- Link organization strategic plan to downstream unit level strategic plan
- Integrate strategic plan to performance management plan of individual employees
- Integrate strategic plan with budgetary planning process
- Establish priority list of projects/initiatives
- Establish monthly and quarterly strategic reviews with leadership
- Coach strategy owners 1-o-1 to overcome roadblocks and challenges
How do we engage?
Business Strategies are dynamic and need constant review. It wouldn’t just be possible for an external consultant to facilitate business strategies in few days workshop that will deliver results.
We steward on your behalf. In simple words, we provide collaborative leadership for strategy deployment. It is not about offering our suggestions and leaving the execution to you or just executing your suggestions. It’s about taking ownership & self-interest, understanding the business model & its dynamics, establishing peer relationship with leadership team, critiquing, contributing ideas, maintaining a good balance of general leadership and specific skills. Above all, we bring an external perspective and are not bound by office distractions.
In a nutshell, being trusted adviser and lieutenant of Chief Executive to deploy business strategy.
What have we done?
These are just few examples of Neil’s experience. They highlight specific interventions, not the full range of work over the years.
Deploy Strategic Planning Process using Hoshin Kanri
For a IT & Engineering Consulting organization, Neil has helped in facilitating the strategic planning process which covers setting goals, evolving strategies, identifying strategic initiatives, prioritizing and establishing scope for the initiatives, integrating the budgetary planning process with strategic planning, coaching the strategic initiative leaders, institutionalizing the monthly & quarterly review process of strategic plans.
The engagement model was to engage with the leadership team and take them to a level where they will be able to manage the strategic deployment on their own in the subsequent years.
Duration: 8 Months
Deploy Hoshin Kanri
For a Bank’s Global Development Center, Neil managed org level annual planning through Hoshin Kanri methodology. Hoshin Kanri is a Japanese policy deployment method that links organization vision & mission to strategy, business goals, tactical plans & individual performance measures. It’s the pace setter for executing the organization’s strategy. Deployment covered extensive 1-o-1 sessions with top leadership to agree on goals, resolution of ownership overlapping goals, orientation workshops for managers and collaborate with HR to tie individual performance measures.
Duration : 6 months
Execute Operations Strategy
For a Bank, under Neil’s stewardship the leadership team derived org level mission, vision and strategy map based on SWOT analysis, market and enterprise strategy. Neil’s role was to guide the group during pre-work and facilitate the workshop, resolve disagreements and reach agreements on common goals & execution plan.
Duration : 3 months
Prioritize & Monitor Projects to Business Strategy
Identifying projects isn’t usually difficult. But prioritizing them is certainly very difficult. Especially a highly charged up and enthusiastic team wants to do everything. Prioritizing strategic projects isn’t about voting the projects. It involves active one-on-one engagement with the stakeholders, getting them on same plane and doing enough homework on what has been past track record before prioritizing. We have prioritized strategic projects for large IT firm.
Integrate Measures of Success (Lead & Lag) across the Organization
For an automobile manufacturer, Neil facilitated the engagement of defining the key business attributes, their desired outcomes, lag measures and lead measures. The entire Metrics Value Tree, established a strong linkage across the length and breadth of the organization being cross functional in nature. This could help break functional-silos.
Further strategic business projects where linked to Metrics Value Tree, thus providing focus to project leaders on which lead measures needs to be improved to show results on lag measures of success.
Read more about our Business Transformation Engagements here