Close the Strategy Execution Gap

Here are some key questions that an executive team should consider if they want to assess how they might manage the business strategy and their organization’s execution capability gaps.

1.     Is there someone that has the accountability for the organization’s strategy execution process?

“If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, you don’t know what you’re doing.”
This famous quote from Edward Deming defines the first step before you can assign accountability for the performance of the strategy execution process.

2.     Are there organizational long-term goals and strategic objectives covering all major functions of the organization and written with clarity using SMART language?

A goal that is not defined with outcome success criteria can cause significant confusion and misinterpretation of the end-state game you want to plan to win.

3.     Is your strategy sufficiently translated into clear actions, projects and initiatives that achieve the intended strategic objectives?

Getting a clear linkage of goal-to-objective-to-strategies-to-tactical action plans will clarify the logic of your strategic project portfolio of work.

4.     Is there a clear ranking of the company’s strategic priorities?

If you have no priorities, nothing is a priority and remember, these priorities may change fast but you need to have at least A-B-C buckets to provide trade-off decision criteria.

5.     Are there prioritization criteria based on the strategy that can be applied to the different portfolios of work that must be executed?

Resource capacity must be applied to the demand of the portfolio and prioritization criteria will help resolve the assignment of critical people resources for a better strategic workforce planning solution.  (This is potentially the most important and complex part of planning that can create significant gap to execute a given strategy.)

6.     Is there a definition of the organization’s execution risks that could reduce shareholder value if they are not mitigated?

An assessment of the capabilities required to execute the strategy will possibly generate more project work but this is just good strategic risk management planning.

7.     Do you have the right performance indicators on your executive dashboard to drive strategy execution that cover the following (thanks to Six Figure Management Method by Patrick Georges):

a.     The ability to know your customers: time facing customers performance (TFC);

b.     The ability to adapt: sales from new and exciting sources for top line performance (SFN);

c.      The ability to minimize cost and delays without compromising quality: gains from process performance (GFP);

d.     The ability to use your best people and increase their responsibility and autonomy: people responsibility level performance (PRL);

e.     The ability to optimally use the resources available: return on critical resource performance (RCR);

f.      The ability to improve things rapidly: key project status performance (KPS).

This simple framework is far more effective than the Balanced Scorecard and it raises the importance of the project portfolio that must must monitored for strategy execution performance.

These KPIs take time to figure out but I assert that leaders can better manage their strategy if they are conscious of what their business model requires to be executed with excellence!  The key is to get these KPIs linked to the people responsible for them in the organization.  So, for example, without an enterprise project portfolio leader, or PMO, you may not get key project status reports in the right form for executives to understand when the benefits will be realized.

By William Malek