Your (strategic) wish is my (delivery) command

(If only it were that simple!?)

Implementing an organisation’s strategy successfully is often a challenge: keeping on top of changing drivers, balancing priorities and resources, achieving longer term ambitions vs operating day-to day. Strategic initiatives can falter, and desired changes fail. There is plenty of evidence to suggest this – simply ‘Google’ “strategy delivery success rate”.

This online event has been presented twice - initially in March 2022, and then again June 2022 for the ROI Chapter of the PMO - PMO Community of Practice.

We presented what we think – but it was primarily offered to host discussion of how organisations can become more effective at maintaining and delivering their strategy. There was opportunity for participants to share their experiences, contribute to the discussion, and most importantly – to step back from what you see every day to realise what you don’t.

We covered:

Introduction
Problems and Solution Outline
Stakeholder Engagement
Issues and Responses
Benefit to roadmap to programme
Outcomes and Expectations
Next Step

There was significant participation in the discussion, which surfaced over 100 key points. Attendees had roles such as:

CEO
Director
Head of PMO
Head of Strategy
Head of Transformation

In the March event, we surfaced areas of concern within:

Information
Integrated Governance
Operational delivery
People and Culture
Resources & priorities
Strategic Management

Link to the YouTube content (5 minute chunks) here

In the June event we surfaced areas of concern within:

Delegation and Delivery
Roles and Responsibility
Strategy Integration
Communication
Prioritisation and Resourcing
Strategy Formulation

Link to the YouTube content (5 minute chunks) here

A full event report and analysis ware prepared for both events and is available on request (Contact us below).

We were able to liken each workshop to the initial engagement within individual organisations, where we could build trust with key strategy players in an organisation and tease out their perspectives and priorities on pain points through interview. We showed how the interview process would be supplemented by a more structured readiness assessment – which would identify areas that the interviews could not reach.

We offered attendees 2 paths as a follow on:

to review the strategic information it holds and iss managing to – with an offer to support the organisation validating its strategy
to review the strategy formulation and delivery operation – to ensure is fit to operate the strategic process and balance that with business as usual and value generation activity

We believe that attendees left with some key take-aways:

The problems I see in strategy formulation and delivery are not just my view
There is a framework I can use to frame the situation and a vision for the future with
I understand there will be inertia to overcome, but that there is an engagement approach which will build trust, enable consensus to be built, and decision to do something to be made