Aligning tactics to strategy
Welcome to September! Guess what it is time for now? That's right, this year's goals and objectives for the company. How are we doing this year so far? Did you set sales, safety, delivery, or financial goals? Did you build that new capability you wanted? Are your teams progressing in maturity?
These are worthy and usual safe things to chase, but are they the right things for your company or teams? You will also find that you may have a team or site that is the benchmark for the company. Translating your vision into the strategy is up to you and your board of directors, and determining how to advance to that vision will be executed by management and the teams. Each team member is aware of their strengths and weaknesses, and this tool can help them grow into that type of person they want to be.
How to build
- Identify the key issues in the organization's customer focused performance. These may come from a Value Stream Mapping Event or a strategic offsite meeting.
- Determine measurable business objectives that address these performance issues. You are not boiling the ocean, and they do not say "do stuff better". A good tool to use here would be a Balanced Scorecard.
- Define or Refine the overall vision and goals. Goals will be listed under Target Operational Results.
- Develop supporting strategies for pursuing the goals. These will be listed next to the Objectives.
- Determine the tactics (or projects) and targets that facilitate each strategy. List tactics above Selected Projects and targets next to Improvement Targets.
- Decide the strength of alignment within the matrixed entries on the map.
- Implement performance measures for every business process. If it is worth doing, it is worth measuring and doing right. Yes measuring is hard, but so is laying people off because you did not work on the things that were important.
- Measure business processes during execution. Do not wait until the end of the year to see if you hit any targets.
How to measure
And now we are off and running! We are delivering sales orders, reports, and briefings. The team is collecting data and we are compiling it into something that tells the real story. Whether we are using a fully automated workflow tool with performance reporting, or collecting information on a form and typing it in a spreadsheet, we need to make sure we share it with the team.
Don't try to create excuses if the information is not great, we are smart enough to see through management's smoke screens. This is the perfect opportunity to use some A3 Problem Solving. Use the results to strengthen your system and processes, and celebrate your successes once in a while.
What results have you seen with your improvement planning?
A deployment matrix is a gret tool to make sure you don't do Lean for the sake of doing Lean. It supports engagement, as team members can see how the projects or initiatives they are being asked to work on support the goals, objectives, mission & vision of the operation.
ReplyDeleteYou're right. The performance we should be improving is what hurts the most and aligns to what matters in the organization. If we do not know how much to improve, we should go ask our customers and see how far off target we are. Performance may be very much off, or just a little off.
ReplyDeleteThanks!!
Excellent Blog John and enjoyed your visual strategy alignment tool. How do you score the ratings? Is this through Individuals? Team Vote? backend scoring? I am guessing it is similar to Stakeholder Analysis but wanted to ask your experiences in applying and how it is received?
ReplyDeleteThanks Steven! In the past I had the smart people use multi-voting to weed out the stragglers and then we used consensus to prioritize what was remaining. It's the long way to do it and there is give and take, but we felt we got a better product out of it. In the end we were trying to engage leadership because they were going to task their resources to execute.
ReplyDelete