The Backbone for Strategy Delivery

Session presented 29th March

Organisations often explain strategy to shareholders through documents, PowerPoint and beautifully designed materials shared on their websites.

However - can you show how your strategic intent has been turned into actions that directors, managers and colleagues can track? Can you see your objectives mixed with expected key results to be tracked by enabling workstreams and projects?

Furthermore - what if you could make it simpler for you and your teams to manage this data, visualise this information and enable understanding of status in terms of change and performance - through an enterprise-wide system that is open to all?

Microsoft Viva Goals provides capability to manage Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) for an organisation, providing the backbone for strategy delivery.

But ...

...we know technology alone is never enough – we know we need to combine people, process, information and governance in an effective operating model...

The Business Integrated Governance (BIG) model provides the framework to connect strategy to delivery and back again, including:

principles to help us understand our current strategy delivery capability and gaps,
components to envision / devise the building blocks we need for improvement,
reference to methods and models, for process, information and data
a model roadmap for culture change.

Link to the YouTube Session Introduction

Event Summary:

Chris and David welcomed attendees and set the stall out with respect to the importance of information backbone to the achievement of strategic objectives.

David then presented an outline of the pains of strategy delivery easily discoverable on the Internet and from the 3 sessions previously run (most recent here). We than asked the group - "What are your pains in strategy delivery?" - this was an open session in Slido which received 18 responses. We discussed as responses emerged. Some are illustrated below with answers to the points:

David presented his view of the strategic process which took the organisation purpose, stirred in opportunities, threats, imperatives and goals (OTIGs) to drive a Vision. The vision would be the basis for a strategy to advance from current state to future state, with a strategy defining the method of approach - including Objectives, Targets and Challenges (OTCs) to be addressed along the way. We noted that to be achieved, we need to appoint accountable people. We noted that even at this high level, the organisation would be prioritising the objectives it had.

We offered a Principles based approach to engagement of stakeholders - which we covered in a previous event in more detail. We signposted the Maturity Assessment that can be done in support of this engagement.

David then introduced the Business Integrated Governance (BIG) Framework as a means to understand the current strengths and weaknesses in a strategy improvement situation - and as a tool to engage stakeholders in a future vision.

We then proceeded to signpost the technologies that need to underpin successful strategy delivery - highlighting that strategy delivery is ongoing - NOT just a one off exercise (well it is a strategic process!). More here about our view that Technology Alone is not Enough.

Chris also signposted the Microsoft Technologies available to support strategy delivery, and proceeded to introduce Viva Goals as a Microsoft Platform to enable the cascade, development and integration of objectives and key results

Chris then proceeded to demonstrate the Viva Goals capability by starting with high level objectives, breaking down into lower level objectives - ensuring there are measurable key results identified to validate / demonstrate the objective. (The demonstration can be seen in the full event recording (please see the link below).

We then offered an outline approach to providing a technology solution into this area, and showed how technology and business change initiatives could be aligned.

We wrapped up by summarising the session:

Strategy delivery is not great – how is it for you?
There is a principles based approach to enable discussion / consensus
BIG Components enable current / future state envisioning
There are multiple technology / information / data elements
Viva Goals provides a backbone for strategy delivery
Getting strategy delivery change onto a table is difficult – yet not impossible!