In today’s competitive world, 90 percent of businesses fail to reach their strategic goals, and the reason may be simple: they don’t execute their strategy. Thankfully, you can take five simple yet essential steps to ensure your strategy gets implemented in your organization. These steps are rooted in the daily decisions and tasks that employees make, and each one directly impacts strategy execution. Here’s how to improve strategy execution in your company.
Develop a strategic action plan cascading from the corporate level through all levels of the organization and connect activity to the overall objective. Once your strategy is defined, cascade it down to the functional level. And be sure to allocate adequate resources to each activity. The most common reasons for unsuccessful strategy execution include inadequate communication, poor visibility, and lack of control. Research shows that 80 percent of leaders fail to execute their growth initiatives effectively because they don’t have the necessary tools.
Implementing a strategy is like sailing a boat towards a planned destination. Although you may have a clear course map and navigational charts, you’ll always need to be vigilant, assess the environment, and adjust your course based on these conditions. Getting the basics right will help you determine which structure is right for your organization and assist you in Go to market strategy. Once you’ve done that, the correct structure will become apparent. It’s crucial to get the right structure to implement your strategy.
Determine key performance indicators, or KPIs, early in the strategic planning process. Make sure to define success in numbers, so your teams can track their progress. A strategic goal may increase customer retention by 30 percent by 2022. A metric for success could be a monthly or weekly retention rate. And if you can’t measure that every day, your strategy execution process isn’t working. In the meantime, you’ll be wasting valuable time.
PMOs are fast becoming an organizational fixture, and they provide significant value to organizations. More than half of the organizations surveyed have a PMO that tracks their portfolio’s performance and formulates strategy. Sixty percent use a dashboard to keep track of their portfolio, while another 59 percent use a PMO to monitor portfolio performance. If you want to make your PMO a more effective tool for success, invest in a strategic PMO that helps you execute your business goals.
The research shows that strategy execution is essential and that planning without execution is a waste of time and money. The Seven Steps to Strategy Execution outlines integrating strategic planning with project management. This framework integrates people, processes, projects, and performance into a coherent and unified strategy execution. To maximize the effectiveness of your strategy execution, you need to develop a strategy that is actionable and sustainable.
The sound execution of a strategy depends on the capabilities of key members of your organization. Strategic performance management (SPM) requires that management teams continuously monitor performance and analyze data to determine what’s working and what’s not. With a strong SPM approach, performance feedback is used to evaluate specific strategic initiatives. Ultimately, strategy execution will lead to an efficient organization with a higher chance of success. Consider these strategies to improve the execution of your corporate strategy.
As part of the strategy execution process, companies must carefully evaluate the barriers and opportunities that will affect the execution of their strategy. If it’s a short-term solution, structural change may be the answer. You can take help of pmo consulting from professional companies like Zl consulting. A company might reduce its management layers and later decide to re-introduce those layers. Instead of implementing a strategy without addressing these issues first, companies should focus on re-evaluating decision rights, information flows, organizational structures, and incentive structures.
Often, strategy execution fails because of a lack of clear direction and a culture that prioritizes autonomy and empowerment. When this occurs, the implementation of the strategy may fail because the business isn’t aligned with the market’s interests. Lack of accurate market intelligence will lead to inconsistent product development, policy implementation, and poor performance management. These challenges may be disastrous for the company, so it’s imperative to get strategy execution right.
