Overcoming Challenges Preventing Strategy Implementation

[Music] well good evening good afternoon good morning uh this is an evening from San Jose California tonight and I I'm pleasure to be a part of this conference uh going forward for the next 20 minutes I'm going to talk about common risks and challenges impacting strategy implementation now I tend to speak at a pretty rapid pace and also I tend to speak pretty ground level so you're going to find some words in here that you may not have heard in professional presentations before but this is what you have to do to understand how to get past these risk and challenges uh going forward at the balance scorecard Institute we've settled on five imperatives uh in regards to strategy implementation and uh uh execution I mean implementation execution it's all the same business as far as we're concerned you've done a lot of work to get the strategy built built uh you've got some of the Strategic elements already built you've involved a lot of people from the organization or at least you should have involved a lot of people from the organization and now you're at the point where we got to do something with all that work that you put in early on so this is where what I like to say and you'll see this referen coming up is that you're going to get into the heavy lifting part of putting that strategy and those strategic elements in place and start getting them working for the for the benefit of the organization so it's focuses on leadership and governance and that's the first one that we're going to hit after this graphic then we're going to move into performance change culture and get into the alignment and organizational strategy side of things you can do a strategy at the corporate or the organization-wide strategy but if you don't align it down through the Departments and divisions uh that's all you've got is an organization-wide strategy and you don't have the rest of the organization engaged uh to help that strategy become real and then of course you got to do some reporting and analyzing as you go through and then there's this last one on the right called the project portfolio management that guess what turns out to be a major fault line in strategy implementation because fundamentally what I found over 48 years in working on and off in this business in strategy building and execution is that the organizations are terrible at executing their projects on time and on budget and why do they think just because they've got a strategy that that particular cultural defect is going to change and this is one thing that you have to take a look at uh going forward so when we talk about leadership and governance this is all about making sure that you really do focus on getting things moving and that's why you're going to see one of the causes is that and this is just one of many causes that I've experienced is that sometimes organizations try to do strategy building and implementation themselves and eventually I I mean one client they admitted when we came in and they contracted with us that they had tried it three times themselves and they found out they needed an outside facilitator to help move this forward first thing you have to do is when you get done with building the strategy is you have to get into a mandatory strategy meeting session in other words we call an execution Cadence which by the way involves three things as a minimum making sure you look at your projects and those progress on a monthly basis making sure you visit the strategy execu elements kpis and the and the Strategic objectives on a on a quarterly basis and then making sure that the communications keeps going by the way Communications is the second fault line in most implementation challenges and and implementations and execution is you stop communicating about the strategy and what's happening you get the entire organization all geared up for the roll out and the launch and then you don't communicate with them for three four months later and they start wondering what was that was that real what we saw two three four months ago because we're not hearing anything about it the other other one of the other things is that you have to remember is that when you bring strategy in to an organization where they're already familiar with things like an Opex budget and a capex budget where they got the operational expenses and they've got the capital expenses now you're adding in a stratex or strategy budget that has to fund those projects and initiatives that are going to be focused on the strategy and oh by the way those particular stratex projects need to be protected because they are attached to strategic objectives in the strategy plan so for any reason they take budget away from a strategic initiative or project that's associated with a strategic objective you are immediately crippling your your strategy going forward this is heavy lifting in this part because now you've got a lot of different things you're measuring and keeping track of and just think about it at the corporate level you may only have 10 15 objectives and maybe 10 15 kpis associated with them but the minute you align down to your departments and uh divisions and down to the teams and individuals that multiplies it really is kind of like a multiplication factor that you have to keep track of so this heavy lifting is what's required for strategy implementation the other thing two is that the annual planning retreat's not going to work anymore in this day and age and that's one of the big causes every every organization say oh we got to do our two or three days in August or September and we'll go do our strategy talk and we'll come back and we'll go back the right same way as we did it before the problem is this day and age and I think everybody got a wakeup call with covid in 2000 in 20120 that you got to be in a planning mode and a foresight mode looking over the horizon so you got to introduce those things into this particular process and start not get to do the annual planning Retreat as you did before you got to start looking over the horizon you got to start picking some Futures to take a look at you got to go back and visit some of your initial uh elements as well like the customer value proposition you can introduce five forces analysis but basically what you're looking at is any technique that will require you to think outside the box going forward now in the terms of the performance culture one of the big ones that I've run into especially when organizations come to us and say we need a strategy we know we need a strategy we've been talking about having a strategy for years but now we need we finally decided we're going to get forward moving with it and then you you get into that environment you find out that there's no accountability in ownership anywhere people just do what the do what the manager says do what the Vice President says and there's really no accountability and they have a safety that built around a lot of employees so that there really is no accountability and ownership well that's one thing that has to change and you have to work on that from a cultural perspective and the only way you can do it is to outline it for your clients or your own organization say this is what we expect the owners to be accountable for that are watching those strategic objectives and kpis and projects going forwards the other thing too is you need to take the focus away from operational things like inputs outputs process and outputs that's operational and that is very easy to fall back into even when you've built the strategy side because everybody lives and works in that operational mode every day and that's what they're comfortable for I call it the comfortable sneaker syndrome you don't want to get into these fast running shoes that are strategy built but you want to stay comfortable in those operational sneakers because that's what you're you you know and you've been in forever while you've been at that organization the other thing too is you make sure those objectives have to be aligned down to the Department's divisions and the unit levels that they're hell accountable and responsible for the objectives at their level as well now the other thing you're going to tackle is the resistance to change and some of this business is basically falls back into the lap of the leaders the leaders got excited and got the organization excited when they built the strategy but then all of a sudden the leadership starts getting silent they don't talk about it in meetings they don't have any Communications about it and so what happens is that they have to get revved up I can't tell you how many sessions I've had both in person and with uh with online where I've talked to the CEOs the vice presidents the executives and said what have you guys been doing to motivate the employees to stay focused on this strategy and the silence is deafening at the other end of the line and it's like they know it and they just know that they haven't paid enough attention to it so you have to make sure that that stays high on their agenda when they make their way around the organization the other thing too is that Communications business has to stay ramped up and even get more aggressive the other thing too is when you start getting into the change culture make sure you pay attention to your rewards and recognition system such that it does not fall into a coma if you even have a rewards and recognition system because when you start aligning your corporate strategy down to your departments those people are going to sit in the room with their arms crossed like this and say what's in it for me and it's like you want me to do all these different things but I'm not seeing anything as far as recognition or some kind of reward to help you know when we make good success how are we sharing that success with everyone so make sure that if you don't have a that kind of a formal system get it in place you got to start somewhere if you have one make sure you don't let it fall asleep now that you think that the strategy is going to take care of not have having need for it the other thing too is the executives have to show up that goes back to something I said earlier about the the executives getting around and keeping the words moving in the organization executive and managers and team leaders need to show up and they need to show up by using a simple technique of mbwa now I'm going to let you Google that term mbw because I was introduced to it back in the early 70s when I first graduated from engineering and business school it was the biggest rate it was the biggest thing at that time and it was so simple to implement that I think a lot of Executives even in the electronic world or the internet world or online world or virtual world have just forgot about how to do that electronically or in person and you have to get that because you have to be up in front and center and if your execs are not doing that you you have to tell them get out of your office and get down to the front lines because that's the thing that's the most important now that we're into the built the objectives and you got the kpis built you got the projects up and running and you got the Gant charts built you're starting to track those sometimes you look at what you did during the build process and you think wow we're not comfortable with these particular kpis because we feel that they're not strong enough and you have to take a look at what something we call strength of the kpis or measures we call them measures or kpis and those strength that you have to assess them are they strong enough to resolve the objectives positively on their own or do they need help by other kpis that assisting them sometimes people pick just the regular operational kpis and they scratch out the words operational and they put strategic that doesn't make it it it really doesn't because it doesn't have that long-term effect that you're looking for you also have to check your target setting if you've been setting your targets with a a guess or a flip of a coin you have to get out of that mode you have to make sure that your targets are set on Baseline data that you've collected or will collect over time and sometimes you have to make sure whatever kpis you put in place you're not incentivizing the wrong Behavior Uh one of the things I remember in one story it was one of the major hotel chains they got all the lobby people all hyped up about making sure that they when they saw a guest coming into the lobby they walked up and said how are you and after time they also said you got to try to remember these guys names because they like that sometimes I couldn't get out of a hotel lobby without being approached five times asking me how my day was and I hadn't even gotten hardly out of the elevator to cross the lobby yet so you have to be careful about what those in what you're doing with those kpis as you go through there now this next one is when you get into data collection you start doing analysis and Reporting and I say reporting Folly because sometimes you try to maintain the old systems where they're all paper and they're all and you have to print you have to have meetings Etc you need to get off of that the first thing I recommend to all my clients especially if they're aligning from corporate down to departments or divisions and down to individuals and teams is you got to get rid of Microsoft Excel that is going to just be a burden That You Can't Sweat with enough and have enough people with in order to keep up with the data that's coming in and also the technology has changed that you can get cloudbased and even behind your own firewall systems with the same security that you're experiencing with your organization now that you can use that to do two things let the systems collect the data and report it out but a performance management system also becomes a huge Communication System you can see it efficiently shares the information which you should be doing anyway on a regular basis so consequently make sure that you got validations over your data sets you know don't get into this correlation versus causation trap if you you're using some correlate kpis is following something else that's not causation it's just a correlation so you just have to make sure that you have everything under control that you're looking at and this particular bullet is major major uh uh heavy lifting going on on this next one we've got the unit op the alignment the they didn't completely align the strategy well that's the problem they have to they have to actually do the alignment and cascading because that's the only way that that strategy is going to get work its way down into the organization people want to know what does it what does what does do I have to do why what does I do what what I do does matter how do we fit down here in the Departments and the divisions with the organization-wide strategy the other thing too is you didn't conduct it so consequently you've got you haven't sub optimiz you got results are sub-optimized operating units technology sub optimized you got a lot of Technologies competing when it could get down into one system and the thing is you just have to go through a structured alignment going forward and consequently you're going to have eliminate a lot of redundant needs and tech for one thing uh when you get your strategy down cascaded down into the uh teams and individuals and departments finally on the process uh on the portfolios and the project management the one biggest problem that had all organizations have if they're also just playing bad on executing projects on time and on budget is they have no way to vet what projects or initiatives we should be moving forward with not only from a strategic side but also an operation side and this is roundabout words to say you got to get a pmo or project management office in place so that you can have this process go through and evaluate on a on a rigorous and aggressive basis with the basis case studies with the Thea the requirements all laid out all the estimates so that they know which ones are going to have the biggest benefit going forward and oh by the way that word benefit benefits are usually built into this into the project scope and the chartering you got to make sure that you keep have a system to evaluate benefits of these projects even after the project has ended are you getting what you thought you were going to get going forward the other thing too is you have to remember at this point you have two streams of influence in those objectives one is the kpis associated with them and one are the the projects that are associated with them so now you've just complicated again the things you have to manage as going forward and then eventually you have to look at what what are the do you have the right capacity many organizations need to do this but they don't have the the skills and the capacities in order to do this and going forward remember projects organ the the strategy runs the organization and the strategies and the projects change the organization so you have to be very focused on this going forward last but not least what I just said very quickly in 20 minutes or less unifies all this together in something that we call the Strategic imp implementation imperatives and the gaps between planning and execution so I have at least I think about one minute here let's see what uh I can move this screen out of the way uh how to connect the portfolio to strategy of Enterprise and how to ensure that we are progressing toward our goals that's where I talked about the execution or implement mentation Cadence one gear is going to be monthly meetings on your projects and initiatives the other gear is going to be a minimum quar uh quarterly meetings on your strategy for three quarters and then that fourth quarter is going to be a deep dive uh where you look at all your strategic elements and see if they need to make any changes going forward my contact information is there don't be shy about reaching out I've talked to a lot of people around the world a lot of the times all over the days and nights and uh I hope this uh in this session was informational uh for everyone that attended thank you very much [Music]