Planning to Execute Business Strategy?

All organisations plan to execute their strategies, yet many struggle to do so successfully and fall short of achieving the results they have predicted. The problem is covered by the old adage: “If you fail to plan, plan to fail.” It should be no shock to learn that the root cause, most of the time, lies not in the technical or tactical execution, but in poor or non-existent front-end planning for implementation, after the strategic plan is completed.

First, let’s look at the problem and its symptoms. Poor execution planning is often the result of what we don’t do, rather than what we do. The first error from the executive suite is failing to determine the real “executability” of a plan before declaring the process of strategic planning a success. Richard Rumelt, a prominent strategy researcher with the Anderson School of Management at the University of California at Los Angeles, says: “Most corporate ‘strategic plans’ have little to do with strategy. They are simply three-year or five-year rolling resource budgets and some sort of market-share projection.”McKinsey published an article recently called “Strategic Planning in a Crisis”, accompanied by a follow-on customer survey. Respondents to the article said that one of the most common significant changes needed in strategic planning (given the current state of the economy) was the need for a rigorous approval and planning process for projects and capital expenditures – and not just at the outset. Often existing projects may need to be killed or postponed, with emphasis shifted to new projects in mid-flight, enabling a company to adapt to a changing market environment or competition.I cannot stress strongly enough the fact that the effectiveness of strategy execution is at risk if downstream-planning processes are not dealing with all of the required functional interfaces of an organisation.

This is one of the most significant things I have learned in 30 years of business experience in global organisations undertaking strategic planning and managing complex programmes. After teaching in Stanford University’s Advanced Project Management Programme, I realised that a common and pervasive systemic risk in executing either a strategy, an initiative, or a project was the lack of what I call “integrated execution planning (IEP)”. This is all about the potential “malfunction junctions” of an organisation; the connections between its silos or departments and the underlying systems and people who actually do the execution work. IEP is essential to manage the complexity of communications, decision rights and information flow that enable interdependent teams to successfully achieve strategic deliverables. There are five key symptoms that arise from a lack of integrated execution planning:

1. Planned programme or project schedules are consistently missed. People can’t reliably estimate when the deliverables will be produced because work priorities or functions in their departments conflict and time devoted to the project is uncertain. As I was told recently by a an executive: “People do have a day job that must be done.”

2. The organisational leaders are not effectively sponsoring projects to make it easier to get work done. If senior managers are working too many hours to be available to effectively sponsor projects, executives may not understand the management skills needed to determine the specific type of planning rigour and leadership that is required in the post-strategic-planning phase. In business school this is called encountering “The Peter Principle”. In some cases, I have witnessed senior managers with an outright aversion to detailed implementation planning.

3. The right people are not available at the right time. Expert resources are not available when needed because other programmes and initiatives override the project. Without integrated people planning around all the projects approved in a strategic plan, resource decisions will be made at the moment by executive whim or the sponsor with the biggest stick. This can lead to significant delays and employee frustration with management.

4. There is low buy-in or commitment from employees who must implement projects because the work plans were imposed upon them. Remember that people help to support that which they help to create. Many organisations limit planning to top-level managers. Instead, include all of your key stakeholders and ensure they can dedicate the needed time. Prof Lawrence Hrebiniak points out strategy planning and execution are interdependent links in a chain, part of “an overall process of planning-executing-adapting”. In a March 2008 article entitled “Making Strategy Work: Overcoming the Obstacles to Effective Execution”, Hrebiniak explains: “This interdependence suggests that overlap between planners and ‘doers’ improves the probability of execution success. Not involving those responsible for execution in the planning process threatens knowledge transfer, commitment to sought-after outcomes, and the entire implementation process.” This is why change-management leaders tell us that “change imposed is change opposed”.

5. There is no process or matrix accountability at management level to drive execution of the strategy. It is process, or rather a lack of process, that makes planning for execution a challenge. Without a standardised IEP process to translate strategic initiatives into concrete, detailed action plans with clear accountabilities across departments, strategy execution is ripe for constant escalations to management to resolve issues born directly out of poor up-front planning and conflicts at the interfaces. A key question then arises: “what planning process downstream of the strategic planning cycle can reduce the time it takes to execute a plan, by up-front coordination of interfaces for both the people and the management system?”

The strength of a chain is dependent upon the strength of its weakest link. The reality is that strategy execution is a chain of simple iterative processes that depend heavily on effective, rapid, stakeholder-attended workshops embedded with a project-planning and change-management discipline. The most successful IEP processes rely on solid group facilitation to develop the systemic visual map of deliverables and major activities and interfaces, as well as providing a safe environment where tough implementation issues and risks can be discussed early on, before they jeopardise the project’s success.

When an IEP workshop is done well, an execution team emerges with a firm, agreed-upon, actionable plan, often in a number of days instead of weeks or months. Through the process, the team builds a thorough, shared understanding of the corporate objectives, strategic and organisational outcomes, roles and responsibilities, schedule of deliverables, execution risks and potential issues and contingencies. Everyone is prepared to move forward immediately with a sense of strategic clarity and collaboration, aligned on a common purpose and motivated by the actual results they’ve produced in developing the plan. Using this approach to execution planning yields impressive outcomes. For starters, we now get more consistent results from all initiatives, projects and programmes, more effective project management in the implementation phase and fewer re-works and delays. There’s less risk in dealing with the cross-functional interface management for strategy execution; department silos are more likely to be on the same page and connected. As an added bonus, managers improve their skills in planning and group problem-solving by acting on and learning about real organisational issues.

In summary, IEP has the ability to impact your organisation’s productivity quickly, as well as ensuring a better capability to achieve longer-term strategic results. But you have to invest the time up front in implementing a systematic process; one that aligns and creates linkages between critical areas of your enterprise’s business functions. Good integrated strategy-execution planning processes and skills are a key link in the chain to making those strategy dreams come true.

By William Malek