From Strategy To Done

Those who work in strategic roles are sometimes accused of “living in ivory towers”. They complain that their work is ignored. They have their numbers cut, they are abolished. Staff are scattered around the organisation to “where their skills can be applied usefully”. They can be seen as an expensive luxury that adds little value. A good concept that fails to deliver!

Some years ago, I worked for a retailer. All senior head office managers had to get out into the business once a month and make themselves useful. Each of us was attached to regional manager, that manager decided what useful meant. I swept floors, picked litter. I also helped plan store refurbishments. I helped store managers with store standards. I was a sounding board for the regional manager on budgets, staffing and other planning.

If you can get out into the business and just be useful, you will become a better strategist. You will learn how the business really works. You will learn that there are a lot of critical undocumented, unvoiced things that just happen. These can the difference between success and failure. You will learn that making assumptions about how things work or will work is dangerous.

In my view the technology strategist must have a range of practical skills. These skills will cover data, applications, infrastructure and the business that they deliver to. The key here is practical. Execution happens through others. Those others must understand and respect the strategic insight. This means there must be credibility. And strategy is pointless without execution.

• Get out there in the business – See the reality of the people who make the money or deliver the service. Talk to them and understand their day to day joys and problems. Understand the opportunities for improving performance where it counts. Observe the impact that our work has on real people. See how we have succeeded or failed. Our conversations with business managers and in IT will then have more credibility.
• Get out there in IT – What is good for the business is good for IT. But here the opportunities to get involved and help are much greater. We have information, skills, knowledge and tools that can help in development and service delivery. We can take complex problems away and let development and service delivery teams focus on their core tasks. When we offer to take a problem away, we must deliver, we must be on time, the solution must be easy to take on. If we fail then we lose credibility. If succeed then we have people willing to follow our guidance. We also have advocates.
• Get out there amongst the managers – Who are we talking to in Internal Audit about business continuity? Who are we talking to about operating and business model changes. Who is doing the talking? Is it boss or the team? Who has the relationships? Who has the bandwidth and capability? Is the boss facilitating team growth?
• Follow through to delivery – Don’t walk away when the concept or direction has been communicated. If you do it will be misunderstood. It will be corrupted, its integrity will be violated, it will not respond to change or it will be discarded. No one understands your ideas better than you do, and no one is more committed than you are. When you walk away and your advice falls apart, it is not because it was bad advice. It lacked interpretation in the light of reality; it lacked a nuance that you could not have foretold. You needed to be there to make a small adjustment. You needed to be there to say “not in this situation”. You needed to be there to make sure that the job was completed properly. When your advice has been delivered to the business and is achieving benefits then you can move on.
• Be available – You can schedule yourself into meetings. You can take a part in projects to get you out there. But you also need to be available when other people want you. There needs to be slack in the schedules to allow informal contact, there needs to be a service culture. Don’t be too busy to build relationships.
• Be flexible – To get out there, you need to be flexible. You need to cover for team members, to shuffle the workload around as a natural way of working. The team should self manage. Priorities are set, the team organises the work to meet the needs without heavy planning.
• No silos – Everyone has a focus ideally aligned with aptitudes, interests and capabilities. But everyone in the team should to be credible cover for everyone else.

You need to get into the world of colleagues and customers to check assumptions. You need to uncover critical details that could derail the strategy or a solution. Do it often and not just related to what you are currently working on.