From Strategy To Done

How we work…

We use a cyclical process to deliver value rapidly.

Value planning

We carry out a rapid study. The study provides a plan to deliver executable technology strategy focused on your business needs. It also demonstrates our strategy sprint approach so that you understand the commitment required. The goal is to…

• Identify the business challenge to be addressed
• Understand and baseline the “voice of the leaders”
• Create a rich problem statement
• Define success
• Define the route to value
• Identify participant groups
• Create a risk management plan
• Identify the key components of the technology strategy
• Identify required assets and their link to value
• Develop the initial plan to deliver:
  • Technology strategy
  • Operating and governance model
  • Strategic capability
  • Change and communications

Strategy development

Typically we will start with a single overarching strategy that addresses the business challenge as a whole. This will be followed by deeper iterations for each key component of the strategy. As we work on the strategy and learn more about the problem space these components are likely to change.

For each key component…

• Develop a challenge statement that captures the breadth of concerns
• Understand the stakeholders and their interests from across the extended organisation
• Identify a representative group of stakeholders to contribute to the strategy and provide feedback, the group must include people who will be directly executing the strategy
• Carry out expert interviews, collate their views as input to create the “voice of the experts” and the “voice of the doers”
• Run a two week strategy sprint
• A prototype technology strategy will be delivered to a selected group of the experts who will act as a focus group. Alternatively, the sponsor of the work may receive the prototype directly
• There will be several iterations to develop the strategy before it is ready for widespread circulation
• In evaluating the strategy, it is critical that the route to value is clearly articulated and that senior leadership commit to it

Operating and governance model design

Technology strategy adoption and execution requires an operating and governance model. The model must drive execution, learn from it and update the strategy. The strategy must be a living, evolving thing. Our approach is:

• We work with key senior stakeholders to capture the perceived operating and governance model gaps that need to be addressed.
• We review and assess the current models to identify key issues such as:
  • duplication
  • excessive consultation
  • lack of accountability
  • teams working against each other
  • silos
  • inconsistent decision making
  • delays
  • escalations
  • deviations from priorities
  • and other wasteful practice.
• In a similar way to developing the technology strategy, we
  • Identify a representative group of stakeholders to support the operating and governance model work
  • Carry out interviews to create the “voice of the experts” and the “voice of the doers“
  • Run a two week strategy sprint
  • Develop a prototype operating and governance model which will be reviewed by a focus group
  • Run several iterations to incrementally define the operating model

Build the capability to sustain strategy

A strategy implies change. Adoption of strategy needs to be “driven”. There needs to be leadership, planning, engagement, communication, education, support, advice, governance, compromise, guidance, behavioural reinforcement, measurement and trust.

A strategy cannot be stable. It must respond to changes in the organisation’s environment, changes to the organisation, feedback from stakeholders and lessons learned from its execution.

Our approach is:

• Work with you to identify a set of people to be the strategy execution “team”
• Teach the strategy execution team our methods, in particular, how to design and run strategy sprints
• Teach simple behavioural approaches
• Teach communications planning and execution
• Teach how to use generative AI as a support tool
• Teach effective work planning and management
• We generally use these broad steps
  • We do, you watch
  • Explain the ideas and templates
  • You do, we watch
  • Follow up review

Incremental adoption

Adoption starts from the beginning of the process. In Value Planning, we engage the leaders whose commitment will be needed to execute the strategy. We aim to understand their interests and motivations so we can:

• Meet their needs
• Educate them early
• Work out how to persuade them
• Help them understand how the strategy benefits them
• Create governance to support them
• Define an operating model that makes strategy execution easy
• Find case examples to demonstrate value or success
• Work with them to co-create strategy that works
• Find advocates who will speak for us better than we can speak for ourselves
• Build the commitment

With leadership commitment, the learning from the organisation can start and the co-creation of technology strategy can proceed. Co-creation is the next phase of adoption. By working with the formal and informal ground level leaders, feasible strategy is created by those who will execute. They will involve and bring along those that follow them.

During the co-creation of the technology strategy, we aim to understand the capabilities, interests and motivations of the teams executing the strategy. We use this to design interventions that facilitate adoption. Some interventions will apply to a broad audience. Other interventions will be focused on specific teams and individuals who have an urgent or specific need.

The incremental adoption process continues with execution and learning from the execution. This learning is fed back into later evolutions of the strategy.

Incremental execution

We differentiate adoption, a team has the capability to execute, from execution where the team deliver on the strategy.

The technology strategy is already broken up into multiple pieces. Within each piece there will be priority areas for executing the technology strategy.

The execution should already have some level of capability to deliver. The operating and governance models will have been designed to support execution. The technology strategy “team”, created as part of the operating model design may need to provide additional support.

Deliver business value and learn lessons

Technology execution often does not release value itself. There are typically other non-technology or business activities required to deliver value:

• Contracts and licence agreements need to terminated or amended
• Staff need to be re-deployed or let go
• Facilities need to be released or sold
• Data needs to be fixed
• Organisation, process, location and other changes

These items should have been captured at a high level in the route to value created in the value plan.