From Strategy To Done

We don’t believe in long wordy strategy documents.

The first thing to produce is a set of strategic business imperatives that the technology strategy will address.

We will study the business strategy. However, we often find that it does not give enough information to derive the technology strategy. Our job and our expertise is not to challenge or rewrite business strategy.

What we need is strong start point that will enable technology to provide impactful gains for the organisation. The big business issues and needs are normally very clear even if not articulated in the business strategy.

The first iteration of strategy explains how technology will deliver strategic business imperatives. This sets the direction and allows the direction to be revised based on feedback before major effort is expended. At this point we are working primarily at senior leadership level.

Subsequent iterations take subsets of the direction and elaborate them. We typically run 2 or 3 of these iterations in parallel. This gives pace and rapid feedback. For these iterations we are working with those that execute the strategy – senior single contributors, first and second level leaders. Their challenge is to deliver the direction set by the leadership. We gain the “wisdom of the doers”. We discover the critical details that are important for the success of the strategy. We feedback to the leadership where we believe there direction needs to change.