StrategyDriven Tactical Execution Forum
“Execution is where the rubber meets the road.”
StrategyDriven Contributors
Strategy without execution is nothing more than wishful thinking pursued with hope. No organization achieves true success unless it is able to effectively execute its initiatives. It is only through execution that leadership’s strategic vision is married to reality.
Tactical execution refers to the collection of actions taken and decisions made at all levels of the organization in the here and now; actions and decisions that ultimately shape the company’s future. Effective execution occurs when the right things get done efficiently. In organizations that execute effectively, leaders continually focus their workforce on accomplishing the priority activities defined by the strategic plan while workers strive to perform those activities in the most efficient manner possible.
Focus of the Tactical Execution Forum
Execution is the life blood of successful organizations. Materials in the Tactical Execution Forum are dedicated to discussing the leading practices of companies that effectively execute their business initiatives and operations to the fulfillment of the organization’s strategic vision. The following articles, podcasts, documents, and resources cover those topics critical to a effective day-to-day work execution:
Articles
Principles Articles
- Some Things Get Better with Time, at least for a while [StrategyDriven Premium Content]
Best Practices Articles
- Best Practice – Priority System Alignment with Mission Goals [StrategyDriven Premium Content]
- Best Practice – Illustrated Priority Systems [StrategyDriven Premium Content]
- Best Practice – Timely Reporting of Activity Status [StrategyDriven Premium Content]
- Best Practice – Eliminate Redundant Work [StrategyDriven Premium Content]
- Best Practice – No Co-, Only Vice [StrategyDriven Premium Content]
- Best Practice – Succession of Authority [StrategyDriven Premium Content]
- Best Practice – Target Non-Value-Adding Work to Improve Efficiency [StrategyDriven Premium Content]
- Best Practice – Are You Thinking Lean? The ‘Wastes’ of Execution: Overproduction [StrategyDriven Premium Content]
- Best Practice – Are You Thinking Lean? The ‘Wastes’ of Execution: Transportation [StrategyDriven Premium Content]
Warning Flags Articles
- Warning Flag – Incomplete Staff Work [StrategyDriven Premium Content]
StrategyDriven Expert Contributor Articles
- How to Lead An Online Business by Samy Liechti
- Seven Secrets of Driving Customer Loyalty – and Profits by Micah Solomon
StrategyDriven Podcasts
StrategyDriven Podcast – Video Edition
StrategyDriven Podcast – Special Edition
Leadership Inspirations – Step Out of Your Box
“If you don’t step out of your box; if you don’t come out of your comfort zone where you look good, feel good, or where you’re liked and admired you won’t progress to live beyond your present potential. Instead, you’ll regress and remain in the reality of your own limitation.”
Howard T. Dickens Jr.
Strategic Planning Warning Flag 2 – Near-Term Focus
Executives and managers maximize their organization’s value through transformative change brought about by the effective execution of a long-range plan. Some executives and managers, by setting long-term goals, the achievement of which is supported by a tactically flexible long-range plan, establish the conditions necessary for their organization to realize the significant benefits of transformative change. In other organizations, executives and managers concern themselves with small incremental improvements, eliminating the possibility of attaining the breakaway successes of truly great organizations.[wcm_restrict plans=”40665, 25542, 25653″]
Strategic planning is about aggregation and the long-term. Tactical execution is about individuals and the near-term. When elements of the strategic plan are overly focused on near-term goals, the organization’s business perspective skews; becoming one of short-term gains at the expense of much more significant long-term advances. Subsequently, projects tend to be of short duration in turn driving budgets and personnel resource projections to one or a few years. The organization becomes so pervasively short-term focused that its actions become reactionary to rather than shaping of the market environment. Remaining relevant and in business becomes the day-to-day objective rather than advancement and value creation.
Near-term planning is a result of either the planning process itself or the way in which the process is executed. While not all inclusive, the four lists below, Process-Based Warning Flags, Process Execution Warning Flags – Behaviors, Potential, Observable Results, and Potential Causes, are designed to help organization leaders to recognize whether their planning efforts are too short-term focused to enable transformational change. Only after a problem is recognized and its causes identified can the needed action be taken to move the organization toward improved performance.
Process-Based Warning Flags
- strategic business planning does not drive the development of clearly defined, quantitative, long-range goals (and may not result in the development of any goals)
- strategic planning processes do not examine the business environment in an effort to understand and project future customer needs, technology trends, and economic circumstances
- duration of strategic projects is often set at one year without regard to actual time needs and frequently without a needs assessment
Process Execution Warning Flags – Behaviors
- executives and managers resist assignment of long-range goals
- executives delegate goal setting to managers, who by their positions tend to be more tactically focused
- executives and managers are indifferent to business environment trend analysis and projections
- lack of executive participation or oversight of activities not under their direct functional control
- expressions of activity importance absent a mission-based goal contribution
Potential, Observable Results
- strategic plan consists largely of one year projects, typically starting on the first day of the business year
- budgets and financial projections, including capital expenditures, are of a short duration
- projected personnel resource needs are often limited to one or a few years or are non-existent
- projects tend to be very narrowly focused, involving and benefiting only a small portion of the organization (a single or a few business units)
- continuous change in organizational direction resulting in a lack of focus, purpose, and commitment
- organization becomes reactionary to the business environment rather than a leader within it
- diminished organizational gains relative to other competitors
- low accountability resulting from continuous change and dismissal of past performance goals
- workforce knowledge, skills, and experience stagnation resulting from the lack of long-term transformative change
Potential Causes
- lack of a long-term vision for the organization
- inability of executives and managers to see the broader strategic picture
- organizational belief that past practices will continue to yield positive results indefinitely
- existence of a dysfunctional executive (primary) and/or management team often the result of a lack of trust, commitment, and/or accountability
- lack of shared accountability for the organization’s performance among executives (primarily) and managers
- hesitance to commit to long-term goals because of low accountability or a fear of failure
- short-term nature of the individual incentive program
- rewards based primarily on individual achievement often within one’s functional area
- lack of reward for team-based efforts, especially cross-functional teams which are commonly required for meaningful, long-term initiatives
- hesitance to commit to long-term goals because of a rapidly changing market
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[/wcm_nonmember]Additional Information
The following StrategyDriven recommended best practices are designed to reduce the likelihood of near-term planning while simultaneously fostering mission-based planning.
- Strategic Planning Best Practice 1 – Make the Mission Measurable
- Strategic Planning Best Practice 2 – Prioritize the Mission
- Strategic Planning Best Practice 3 – Strategic Discipline
- Strategic Planning Best Practice 6 – Focus on Strength
- Strategic Planning Best Practice 7 – Shared Accountability
- Strategic Planning Best Practice 8 – Results First, Action Second
- Strategic Planning Best Practice 10 – Future Focus
- Organizational Performance Measures Best Practice 1 – Vertically Cascading
- Organizational Performance Measures Best Practice 2 – Horizontally Shared
StrategyDriven contributors have created several illustrations to visually depict the mission to programs, budgets, and procedures alignment. The Strategic Alignment Model highlights the alignment that should exist between an organization’s mission and its programs, budgets, and procedures. The Strategic Organizational Alignment Model reveals the typical executive and managerial responsibilities associated with identifying, reaffirming, and translating the organization’s mission into goals and objectives and then into programs, processes, and procedures.
StrategyDriven Podcast Episode 13 – Introduction to Strategic Analysis
StrategyDriven Podcasts focus on the tools and techniques executives and managers can use to improve their organization’s alignment and accountability to ultimately achieve superior results. These podcasts elaborate on the best practice and warning flag articles on the StrategyDriven website.
Episode 13 – Introduction to Strategic Analysis serves as a foundation for the upcoming series of podcasts focused on the best practices associated with strategic analysis. This discussion:
- defines what a strategic analysis is
- describes the components of this in-depth examination of the organization and its business environment
- identifies how strategic analysis helps an organization become more strategy driven
[powerpress]
Portfolio Management – Managing Shared, Perishable Resources
Portfolio managers direct deployment of assigned resources across the several programs, projects, and processes they oversee in a manner that maximizes the organization’s return on investment. (See Figure 1) Complicating the portfolio manager’s work is the myriad of differing resource types; resources that are often limited and shared by the portfolio’s many components.[wcm_restrict plans=”25541, 25542, 25653″]
All work requires resources for its performance. Resource types can be generally categorized as:
- Personnel – skilled labor and knowledge resources
- Equipment – tools, software applications, and facilities resources
- Material – land, parts and components, commodity materials and supplies, data, and intellectual property resources
- Financial – cash, credit, and other financial instrument resources
Unlike many financial and non-perishable material resources, personnel and equipment resources cannot be stored or saved. Subsequently, the usable quantity of these perishable resources diminishes with the passage of time; making it imperative that the portfolio manager fully engage all available personnel and equipment resources in, what is for them and the organization, the most value adding activities at all times.
The challenge of maintaining high, value-adding utilization of perishable resources is dimensionally more complex for the portfolio manager than for his/her subordinate program, project, and/or process managers. Not only must the portfolio manager ensure the lowest cost yet qualified resource is assigned to a required activity (no busy work in our organization), he/she must assess the activity’s value against the collection of tasks comprising all of the portfolio’s programs, projects, and/or processes. As if this was not difficult enough, the portfolio manager must also be concerned with the timing of value delivery because a small gain today may far outweigh a much more significant benefit realized tomorrow. Heightening the challenge further still is the fact that the portfolio manager deals with a collection of critical paths having little or no time buffers rather than one critical path and a set of subordinate activity series with differing amounts of float. How then can the portfolio manager establish and maintain high, value-adding perishable asset utilization?
Achieving High, Value-Adding Personnel and Equipment Resource Utilization
The varying nature of portfolio complexity, the dynamic interrelationship of activity and resource dependencies as well as the differing time frames of needed value delivery, precludes the use of a step-by-step procedure for portfolio resource distribution. However, application of the following guidelines can help a portfolio manager achieve and maintain a high level of value-adding resource utilization.
Part 1: Define the value proposition of each program, project, and process
- 1. Identify program, project, and process value as a function of mission-achieving benefit
- 2. Identify the cost or value decline of each program, project, and process as a function of mission-achieving benefit associated with time delays (See Figure 2)
Part 2: Identify the activity constraints imposed by shared resources
- 3. Order the portfolio’s components as collections of activity sequences
- 4. Identify each program, project, and process’s critical path activity sequence
- 5. Identify all shared and interchangeable resources
- 6. Identify the critical chain* of activities associated with shared resources (See Figure 3)
Part 3: Resolve conflicts to maximize timely value generation
- 7. Identify and eliminate unnecessary tasks
- 8. Identify unconstrained substitute resources to alleviate activity constraints
- 9. Identify and implement acceptable activity sequence modifications
- 10. Prioritize activity performance based on overall program, project, and process value creation; considering critical path time delays and the associated impact on value creation and delivery timing
- 11. Adjust program, project, and process activity sequencing, as necessary, to accommodate the perishable resource constraints (See Figure 4)
* Concept adapted from Critical Chain by Eliyahu M. Goldratt, The North River Press Publishing Corporation, 1997.
The illustrated case presented here is highly simplified compared to the circumstances most portfolio managers will face. The guidelines provided for achieving high, value-adding utilization of the organization’s resources are fully scalable; applying in both simple and complex cases.
Maintaining High, Value-Adding Personnel and Equipment Resource Utilization
Portfolio managers recognize the validity in the anecdote that no plan can survive an engagement with reality. Subsequently, these managers must maintain a degree of flexibility; routinely evaluating and redeploying, as necessary, the organization’s resources across the portfolio’s components in order to sustain maximum value.
Ongoing evaluation and redeployment of perishable resources should be performed using the guidelines for achieving high, value-adding resource utilization. While not all plan changes will significantly impact the overall portfolio, the guidelines provide the portfolio manager with the awareness necessary to quickly identify those that do and to adjust the resource distribution accordingly. Similarly, the guidelines suggest the portfolio manager be aware of shareable resources; this being necessary to facilitate the rapid identification of alternate resource sharing to alleviate high value constraints.
Final Thought…
Managing a portfolio’s resources to maximize value is as much of an art as it is a science. The guidelines provided are not intended to usurp the knowledge, experience, and good judgment of the portfolio manager but rather to provide him/her with a logical structure on which to ground resource management decisions. In the end, business needs, framed by ethical values, should drive all resource decisions.[/wcm_restrict][wcm_nonmember plans=”25541, 25542, 25653″]
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