Strategic Themes

Strategy

Improving strategy implementation - Strategy implementation is difficult: we know this from research and personal experience! We also know that environmental factors are constantly changing, that business performance goes up and down, regulation hits us, changes are more or less effective than we expect, and people are not 100% predictable.

Strategy Improvement readiness assessment - The BIG Maturity model shines a light on how your overall governance ecosystem is working, to enable to you define how it should work - enabling a roadmap of improvement to be quickly and simply started.

Strategy delivery – you have to think BIG - Strategy development and delivery is not perfect in many organisations - there are many reports which enumerate our strategy delivery success rates. At two recent workshops, we asked "What reasons have you encountered for why strategies have not been delivered?" - we have collated around 150 points from current practitioners. You can access the event report here. It is almost as if some of us expect strategy delivery to happen just by magic. Well - the reality is it won't happen by magic - and - evidentially it isn't happening by magic - so we need some Honest Engineering! We ran a session where we looked at ISO 37000 and the Business Integrated Governance model - and realised there are some good answers in that material - if you know what you are doing and can engage stakeholders....

Strategy Delivery - Somehow the Magic Happens. Successful organisations are led by smart creative people who can listen, evaluate, imagineer and lead. The details are left to managers who translate the ask into a go-do - right? 

When the go-do fits within controllable domains, we can expect results. But when our transformational change goes cross-business, value stream development and delivery involves several areas, and our business as usual is focused on bonus laden area targets - how to we integrate, performance manage and make objective priority calls? Do we have the objectivity of assurance, the support of governance professionals and the reliable information sources we need for agile decision making? 

Bridging the Strategy Gap - Effective interface between strategy development and strategy execution. There’s plenty of survey evidence that strategy fails to deliver the hoped-for changes. And that is often blamed not on the strategy itself but on its execution. But we think the problems lie much more often in the flawed strategy development approach. What if there was an approach which developed better strategy and made for a better interface between development and execution?

Your Strategic wish is my Delivery command - If only this was true. Our boards are full of smart and creative people who listen to the world, respond to its opportunities and threats, take on goals and plot courses to the future.

There is always a challenge in communicating expectations – especially when those longer-term expectations sit alongside management of the here and now. As a strategy leader – are you confident you have the means to prioritise and task the business effectively, and does the business have the organisation and facility to show you accomplishment, risk and forecast outcome?

Is your vision and strategy being let down by the capability within the business to balance BAU, value generation and change – or the means? We discuss the challenge and the CxO perspective on it, discuss how to address this challenge, what the outcomes of addressing it may be – and offer first steps to get an improvement process off the ground.

Technology

Technology alone is not enough - All of us work with information. We all know office tools. Some of us use corporate systems. We have soft data in documents, and hard data in tables somewhere. We use information to (for example) illustrate performance, convey ideas, highlight issues, and make decisions. If we are missing even only a few pieces - our professional workloads can become unbearable!

Business Support

Business Support - promote your PMO - We all understand the phrase ‘project support’ and know what it means, but where the things being supported are not just projects – what do you call it?

Business Integrated Governance defines governance from the primary governance body through board sub committees to change portfolios, value streams and business as usual departments while. The business support available must be able to reach  credibly across the business. This page provides links to various presentations explaining the opportunity and the implication – and points to help to get change started. 

Governance

Maturity Model - This series of blogs is challenging organisations to sidestep the seemingly unavoidable politicking that hampers, subverts and even completely derails some improvement initiatives before they get going. Do this by taking away opinion-based drivers that can so often be motivated by improving one area over another, or by scoring points with parochialism.

The fact is - we do struggle to get initiatives off the ground because we can't gain consensus on the issues because some rooms are just too full of elephants. We can help take the debate out of current state. This series of 5 blogs puts the case for Maturity model as the basis for engagement. 

Governance and Assurance Perspective - This series of blogs surround the presentation made by David Dunning to the APM Governance and Assurance SIG, and listed a small case example of how BIG can be used as a basis for Governance and Assurance design. This series of 6 blogs can be found off the Governance Campaign. 
 

Main / Executive Board Challenges. addressed in BIG - With hard-hitting language, this addressed the common perception that post strategy development (in one's Ivory tower) that Main / Exec board interest in strategy delivery then disappears completely. This series of 11 punchy blogs can be accessed off the Main Board Campaign Sub menu.

Legacy Themes

Challenges of Strategy Delivery - Strategy delivery is challenging – and many organisations struggle! In 2022 we organised a series of events probing strategy delivery issues, and exploring sensible approaches for improvement – and it’s time to take this further!

We don't know answers for you - but we don't yet know your problems and context. What we do know is an approach (see our pages on Engagement, Building Enablers and Culture Change), what the journey may look like, and have access to a network of experts who will be able to help.