Would your colleagues and staff describe your strategy in the same way you do?
How do you get your organisation to follow the plan?
You may have invested in extensive strategic consulting, research and statistical analysis. But how do you encourage your teams to own the way forward?
At StrategyWorks we help you hold the conversation to articulate your strategy in terms of your Strategic Objective, Scope, and Advantage. We will coach your individual leaders and facilitate workshops to allow your teams to integrate your findings and decisions.
Coaching allows you as leader to reflect on your inputs and decisions.
Facilitated workshops tap into the collective experience of your teams and allow your team to invest themselves in your strategy by creating their unique parts of the implementation plan. We like to engage with our clients in the following processes:
Defining the core of your strategy
We will use specific conversation models to help you define:
- Your purpose (who you are in your market place)
- Your values (what is important to you and how you want to behave)
- Your vision (what you want to achieve)
- What makes your organisation distinctive
- Strategy Canvas showing your Value Proposition
- Value Chain diagrams and Activity-System Maps to show your unique activities through which you deliver your offer
- Three circle diagrams to identify the "Sweet Spot" in your strategy
- Porter's Generic Strategies to position your offer in your industry
Scanning your environment
The quality of your advantage statement will depend on the quality of your understanding of the environment in which you operate and the state of affairs within your organisation. At StrategyWorks we offer the following models to assist you to collate and understand this information:
- PESTEL analysis (looking at Politics, Economics, Social factors, Technology, Ecology and Legal factors)
- Porter's Five Forces of competition (Buyers, Suppliers, Barriers to entry, Substitutes and Intensity of rivalry)
- BCG Growth-Share Matrix (Dogs, Cows, Stars and Question-marks).
- Stakeholder analysis (Who are the key stakeholders governing the definition and implementation of your strategy?)
- Core Competencies (What you do that delivers high value, is attractive to your market and is difficult to imitate)
- SWOT diagram (Matching your resources and capabilities to your competitive environment)
Translating your strategy into a plan
We assist you to translate your strategy into a plan using:
- A Theme Map to give an overview of the core themes and goals of the strategy
- A Strategy Map to show the cause and effect relationships between the detailed objectives
- A Balanced Scorecard showing the metrics and targets you will use to measure your progress towards your objectives
- The Strategic Initiatives required to align resources to achieve the company strategy
Planning your operations
We have found that most organisations have their own approach to improve processes to support their strategies and for creating Sales Plans, Operating and Capital Budgets and Resource Capacity Plans.
We are often drawn in to define the Strategic Initiatives defined to implement the strategy.
Monitoring and learning in execution
The success of your execution depends on your ongoing review of your strategy. We will assist you to establish two types of meetings as you implement your strategy:
- Operating meetings to review the performance and address problems
- Strategy review meetings to review performance against strategic indicators
Adapting your strategy
You may find assumptions supporting your strategy are flawed or obsolete. We can facilitate workshops to understand and integrate the findings from cost and profitability reports and the statistical analyses you carry out to understand your business.
At these sessions we can also assist you to evaluate strategic ideas coming from your team.
These workshops can prepare you for the next strategic cycle as you collect information for your internal and external scan.