Stratetect

I have been trying the consumer preview of Windows 8 and I have two comments.  First, I love the look and feel of a new tablet interface, and second, this is the most horrible, unmanageable business application interface of all time.

What prompts my feedback, is "fit for purpose". Windows still enjoys over 95% maket share of all home and corperate PC's.  Not corperate and private tablets.  I actually think that Win8 is abeautiful touch interface and will probably make a huge splash on the tablet market.  But as a continuation of a corperate and business focused interface....its a huge failure.  The whole full screen app situation is exactly what has kept Mac at less than 5% of market.

Sorry, I think its a huge failure.  I loved Win7 for the innovation and improvements that it made over Vista, but then to be frank DOS 5 was an improvemrnt over Vista.  

This is more of the same and less of the best from the biggest and the most boring software vendor on the planet.

At a recent not-for-attribution dinner with several (exceptionally) successful internet entrepreneurs, the conversation quickly turned to talent. How do you get the best value from your best people over time? The majority insisted that top talent's time should focus on the highest value-added problems and opportunities. Align the best people against the biggest challenges that only they can surmount. Let them create new game-changing algorithms; let them transform user experience. Above all, your top talent should amplify, extend and consolidate what makes your business model work.

But that's where the contrarian minority view kicked in — and I agree with it. Of course your best people should focus on your biggest issues. But one of your biggest issues is also — and will always be — the boring and horrendously inefficient scut work that all organizations accrue. NextJump's Charlie Kim (yes, I got his permission to attribute), the founder of one of the internet's most successful loyalty and rewards programs, argued that as organizations scale, they often slip, slide and default into less than mediocre processes that get the job done. Unfortunately, the job gets done in manual, jury-rigged or improvised ways that are deadly dull to manage and excruciatingly boring to fix. 

What talent-loving entrepreneurial CEO would assign his best people to such awful tasks? Charlie would. He hires world-class talent but his business rationale is impeccable. Sustainable innovation — and the resilient processes supporting it — require creative ways of getting rid of the computational crap and digital detritus that inevitably occur when organizations try to keep going and growing fast. They get a little too far ahead of their ability to reliably and cost-effectively deliver. 

This seems counterintuitive. But savvy leaders understand that, as their operations scale, the real barriers to growth aren't around the ingenuity of value-added implementations; they're in the lag-behind, necessary evil support systems and three-quarter baked infrastructures desperately attempting to support them. Typically, talent-rich organizations assign their mediocre people to solve these seemingly mediocre problems. But that, says Charlie, is short-sighted.

Put your most talented people on these most boring and stultifying issues. They'll come up with approaches and solutions that annihilate the inefficiencies and enable new opportunities for value-added enhancement and growth. Charlie told a vignette about a first-rate programmer assigned to fix a bottleneck manual process that required time-intensive and error-prone manual entries into Excel. Her software not only automated the process, it invited greater innovation. Successfully confronting scut work can stimulate the best of both worlds: rickety, non-scalable and unreliable processes are eliminated and everyone in the organization now has more time and energy to add more value. 

That's a big win. It's also great for morale. Of course, many firms have cultures where the best programmers and people write and share tools that make life simpler, faster and easier for everyone else. That was fairly common in Microsoft's and Google's early days. But this "best people/seemingly trivial scut work" sensibility is hardly confined to digital industries. Most people know the saying, "If you want something done, give it to a busy person" because they have the impetus, incentive — and capability — to do it. Intriguingly, having your most talented people invest time and effort in solving the stultifying sends an important cultural signal. Improving efficiency and effectiveness for the entire organization — for everybody — should be a top management and top talent priority, too. Bright leaders pick the "right" boring challenges to address.

Does that require a streak of humility from the firm's most talented and able? Yes, says Charlie. But that's what he increasingly hires for. It's a cultural value NextJump celebrates.

It may sound paradoxical but if your very best people aren't directly involved in fixing your organization's most persistently boring processes, then you are failing as a leader and value-added manager. Get your best people excited about transforming the dull, boring and essential.

Project Definition - Why, What, Who, When and How?

I was recently contacted by an organization to conduct an assessment of a major project that was going south. I was told the project started seven months ago and consistently missed planned milestone dates since its inception. While the outcome of my assessment was a recovery plan to get the project on track the major component missing from this project was clear definition of the project. 

The project definition phase lays the groundwork for obtaining information about the project and provides a shared understanding about its objectives, sponsorship, costs, benefits, timeframes, resources and mandate. The following template presents the fundamental things that should be clearly agreed at the commencement of a project. They form the basis upon which the project and project stakeholders will be defined and measured. 

Management Priority and Strategy 

Describes why the project is being initiated, the priority of this project in relation to other projects underway and the strategy to deliver the project. It may include a business case or at the very least a project request form that answers the questions: How does this project align with our strategy and what are the expected benefits to the organization upon completion of the project. 

Organization Structure and Roles and Responsibilities 

Identifies the project organization's structure and describes the roles and responsibilities of the project sponsor, manager, team members and stakeholders throughout the project life cycle. The roles, responsibilities and deliverables of external vendors, companies and/or individuals also need to be documented. It is important to identify who must sign off on various project management documents in this section. 

Project Change Control 

This section describes the process for requesting, approving, denying and managing all project changes. A turn around time service level agreement should be established among all stakeholders to analyze the change request, determine its impact to project cost and schedules and obtain a decision to approve or deny the request. 

Project Metrics 

The project manager and executive stakeholders should define and mutually agree upon the project metrics to be used to measure team member performance and/or organizational project management performance. Criteria for project success should also be defined for reward and recognition of team members for successfully completing the project. 

Budget Overview and Cost Control 

All cost and budget considerations for the project need to be identified such as labor (internal and external), equipment, software, web-hosting, travel, lodging and meals, training, documentation, maintenance, facilities, and reward and recognition. A spreadsheet of changes and variances to budget must be maintained and the spreadsheet should be closely linked to changes approved via the project change control process. 

Key Assumptions 

 Key assumptions are expected factors that for planning purposes are considered to be true, real or certain. Examples are: 

·         Team members will be afforded the appropriate time to complete assigned tasks within established project timelines. 

·         Business unit and IT management will communicate to appropriate management what work is being re-assigned or delayed due to the time allocated for resources assigned to this initiative. 

Key Constraints

Key constraints are known factors that restrict the available options. Examples are: 

·         There is a budgetary constraint of $XX for training. 

·         The solution must be built on our existing software systems. No off the shelf products will be introduced. 

External Dependencies 
External dependencies are other programs or projects whose timelines may be impacted by this project or other programs or projects whose timelines impact this initiative. 

Project Risks 
This section identifies the major risks, the probability of occurrence, the impact to the project if they occur and what actions will be taken to mitigate and/or eliminate the risks. 

Resource Requirements 
Resource requirements should be spelled out very clearly regarding how much time is expected per day/week of each individual assigned to the project. 

Communications Plan 
This section describes what communication methodology will be used to ensure all project participants and stakeholders are kept informed of project information such as progress, slippage and risks. 

Management escalation process 
This section describes specific mechanisms used to assist in management control over the project. This section describes the process to escalate issues or problems that cannot be resolved at the project level within the organization. This section also describes the threshold at which point the project sponsor wants a delay escalated to his/her level. 

Management Review 
This section describes the process for reviewing project status by the project sponsor, manager, team members, executive steering committee, and other project stakeholders as required. This section focuses on the process to ensure management oversight of the project. Oversight will provide early detection and correction of potential or recognized problems that affect project delivery. 

It is important that the project definition is fully understood and agreed by all persons concerned. The details should be incorporated into a document, formally signed off by the project sponsor, manager and team members and communicated to all interested parties. Once the project is adequately defined the team will be better positioned to move on to the business requirements, scope definition and project planning phases of the project and hopefully avoid the need for a project review and recovery plan. 

Strategic Planning

So what is strategic focus?

Leadership models and new business models are key ingredients to success in this new, socially driven and aware business age.

Any successful model is built around servant style leadership with a focus on strategic thinking by harnessing the creativity and innovation of the employees.

The vehicle to accomplish this is the strategic planning process.

Strategy serves as the organization's compass and roadmap to future success. Strategic thinking must be clear and communicated effectively throughout the organization.

• It is not something you can leverage with technology.
• It isn't something you will find in the latest business manual.
• It is embedded in the minds of the management team and most of our employees.
• It is our employees who are on the front line and know what is really going on with our customers and markets.
• It requires effective leadership to release the power of the employees in building a strategic roadmap to the future.

Defining objectives and developing initiatives and action plans to meet those objectives is the basis of strategic planning. However, it all starts with an end game, a "Vision for the Future."

Strategic planning is a management tool. It is used to help an organization clarify its future direction - to focus its energy, and to help members of the organization work toward the same goals. The planning process adjusts the organization's direction in response to a changing environment.

Strategic planning is a disciplined effort to support fundamental decisions and actions that shape and guide what an organization is, what it does and why it does it, with a focus on where it wants to go and how it is going to get there.

Fundamental decisions, actions and choices must be made in order to develop a plan that provides a Roadmap on "How to get there from Here."." The plan is ultimately no more, and no less, than a set of decisions about what to do, why to do it, and when and how to do it.

The scope of the strategy development process for any company is dependent upon individual business needs. The strategic planning process is a time and resource-consuming endeavour that involves many people in the organization. This process includes both tactical and strategic application.

The Ten Step Process

Let's identify the steps first and then we'll discuss each one in a little more detail . I cannot emphasize enough that the true value of a strategic plan is not in the document itself. It is in the process of creating it, involving many of your employees from the bottom up. This empowers them to be more effective and better-informed leaders, managers and decision makers.

1. Select the strategy team and send a company wide communication

2. Create a Vision for the Future (End Game)

3. Preparation -----Secure an off site location for the kick off meeting which includes training the team on the strategic planning process. Purchase a strategic planning template, download one from the web or e-mail stratetect@gmail.com for a generic sample.

4. Complete a SWOT analysis. (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities & Threats)

5. Identify the critical core initiatives that are necessary to support the vision for the future and to achieve its objectives

6. Develop strategic implementation plans (SIPs) that support the identified critical core initiatives

7. Prioritize the CCI's and SIP's based on the biggest impact on the bottom line in the shortest period of time. Modify and complete the document template to fit your company strategy

8. Develop an accountability process based on a structured monthly strategic review

9. Develop a presentation of the strategy for approval by the CEO, owners or Board of Directors.

10. Develop a Roll Out Strategy to explain the strategic plan to the entire company

Step One --------- Selection and Communication

It all starts with communication. The very first piece of information should be the announcement to all employees that the company is embarking on a planning process for the future. This memo should be sent from the President asking for everyone's support. (A sample memo is available from stratetect@gmail.com)

The memo will likely announce who the strategy team members are and ask for everyone to congratulate them and provide input at every opportunity. CAUTION: Make sure that you have talked to any employee in advance that was not picked for the strategy team that may feel that they should have been.

Once the team is announced and the process starts make sure you continue to keep employees aware of the progress and solicit their input. A minimum of a monthly memo should be issued. The strategic planning process can take from 6 weeks to 12 weeks so it is important to keep everyone informed without releasing too much detail.

The strategy team should include a senior accountant, and should consist of between seven and ten members. Team selection should be based on competence, integrity, work ethic, leadership skills, and future growth potential within the Company.

The team will formulate and present the strategic document to the President/CEO and the Board of Directors. It is critical that all employees are empowered and encouraged to communicate their ideas and issues with any member of the strategy team. This process ensures accountability and ownership of the strategy at every level in the organization.

Step Two --- A Vision for the Future (The End Game)

The Vision for the Future (End Game) in business is simply defining what winning the game in your business is really about. What does winning mean. Just exactly what do you want your company to be when it grows up? Ask yourself the following questions from the perspective of looking five to seven years into the future.

1. What markets should your company be serving five years from now?

2. What products should you be distributing?

3. Who are your primary competitors?

4. What are your strengths?

5. What are your competitors' strengths?

6. How has your marketing strategy changed?

7. What are your core competencies?

8. What is the size of your revenue stream?

9. How is your revenue stream segmented?

10. Do you have a Human Resource Development plan?

The CEO/Owners should create the "Vision for the Future" (End Game) for presentation to the strategy team.

Step Three --- Preparation

Running a strategic planning process is not just designing a template and having the team members fill in the gaps. On the contrary, it means carefully coaching the management team through a thinking process.

Often, the actual strategic plan is even less important than the development and growth of the team members participating in the process. The strategy team should be trained on the process you intend to follow in developing the strategic plan. Once that is competed the CEO/President should present the vision of the future with copies for everyone and then excuse himself from the meeting to allow the strategy team to tear the end game apart and put it back together.

The President will have explained that they have the right and the obligation to challenge the end game if they do not agree with any part of it. However, any challenge to any portion must be accompanied by alternative recommendations. The concept is to finalize a "Vision for the Future" that everyone owns.

Step Four---- The SWOT analysis

The team will conduct a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) analysis to identify critical constraints and potential opportunities for growth.

Step Five --- Developing the Critical Core Initiatives from the Vision for the Future 

Critical core initiatives are over arching initiatives that are found within the Vision for the Future. An example may be defined as a human resource initiative for becoming employer of choice. There are many independent action steps (Strategic Implementation Plans - SIPs) that will be required to accomplish the Critical Core Initiative (CCI). They may include training, education, leadership development, compensation and benefits etc.

Identifying the CCI's first is necessary to move on to the next step which is creating SIPs for each CCI.

Step Six--- Prioritize the CCI's and identify individual SIPs for each CCI

A Strategic Implementation Plan (SIP) is a set of tasks that supports a Critical Core Initiative and therefore creates fundamental change in the way you do things. SIP work deals with long-term improvement and change, balancing concern for today with concern for the future and is a fundamental task of managerial decision-making. Work against SIPs deals with improving things for tomorrow.

Each Critical Core Initiative is supported by a set of SIPs that contain a sequenced set of tasks, schedules, and named responsible individuals. The creation of SIPs indicates that the chosen area is one that provides a high payoff in terms of innovation and managed change.

Step Seven --- Assign sections of the strategy template to be completed by different team members

Developing the strategy document from team homework assignments completed over the previous weeks is a matter of following the template that has been modified to meet your specific company needs.

Step Eight --- The accountability process

The key managerial tool to ensure steady, consistent progress on SIP tasks is the formal Operational Review Meeting (ORM). This is the foundation to insure that the strategic plan is successful. The ORM is held monthly. The purpose of the ORM is to:

o Clearly understand the status of your key initiatives.

o Keep executive focus on strategic, rather than just urgent, issues.

o Facilitate communication and support throughout the executive team and the company.

o Formulate emergency responses to company-wide threats or opportunities.

o Leverage all appropriate company resources while maintaining proper accountability for performance.

The ORM should be attended by members of the Strategy Team, executive management and other senior managers. It will follow a formal agenda and discussions will be driven by two objective measurements: performance of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and progress of SIP task completion. SIP and action item owners will be held accountable for achieving the desired results by the due date indicated on the plan. The entire team will be held accountable for meeting SIP goals.

Step Nine --- Developing the presentation for approval

The strategy team will provide the strategy document to ownership at least one week in advance of the formal presentation. Representatives of the strategy team will present the plan and defend it from a considered corporate challenge. The purpose of the challenge is to ensure that the plan is well thought out and based on a realistic assessment of the company's risks and constraints.

The presentation will also demonstrate the degree of commitment and ownership by the team. The objective of the meeting is to formally endorse the strategy for the company. If necessary, the team will revise and re-present the plan to obtain ownership approval.

Step Ten ---- The Roll Out Process

After formal acceptance, the President and two to three strategy team members should schedule meetings to introduce the strategy to the entire management team and all other employees, thus formally launching the strategy. This should be a big deal and should be completed as quickly as possible. In person presentations by executive management and strategy team members is highly recommended.

Strategy Development Overview

Strategic planning is a management tool. It is used to help an organization clarify its future direction - to focus its energy, and to help members of the organization work toward the same goals. The planning process adjusts the organization's direction in response to a changing environment. Strategic planning is a disciplined effort to support fundamental decisions and actions that shape and guide what an organization is, what it does and why it does it, with a focus on where it wants to go and how it is going to get there.

Discipline is a prerequisite to this process because it requires laser like persistence to result in a productive strategic planning initiative. The process raises a sequence of questions that helps planners examine current reality, test assumptions, gather and incorporate information about the present and perform trend analysis on the future industry environment. The prioritization of initiatives and SIPs is an essential step. Although your strategic plan will cover a five to seven year period prioritized SIPs are worked on during the first twelve to eighteen month period based on bandwidth and resources while other CCIs and SIPs are deferred. It is much more effective to completely finish three or four SIPs pertaining to one or two CCI's than to work on ten or twelve SIPs and accomplish nothing.

Fundamental decisions, actions and choices must be made in order to develop a plan that provides the roadmap to the future. The plan is ultimately no more, and no less, than a set of decisions about what to do, why to do it, when and how to do it.

Anything in excess is not healthy. It appears from my observations that organizations have far too many projects in their portfolio.  This causes an almost universal and unhealthy environment of strategic projects delivering late, over budget and failing to meet organizational or business goals. This creates within the organization an acceptance of poor results when better outcomes were expected and promised.

Simply put:  project volume exceeds resource capacity. Having an overabundance of projects underway moving at snails pace is not an effective way of executing strategy.

Organisational leaders confront a multitude of opportunities, but rather than set priorities, most simply take on too many projects that are manned with stretched and stressed resources with diluted focus.

Think about why there are so many project management conflicts over resources and priorities. First of all organizations are simply not built for change. Organizations are built to provide a service or product and when the capacity to provide that service or product is not sufficient additional staff is hired to support the volume.

However when it comes to projects, which are the execution of change to bring about a positive impact to the business, organizations have not determined what their capacity is for active projects. As a result anyone with authority (political clout) can initiate projects irrespective of the capacity of the organization to do the work within the given timeframes in order for the company to reap the benefits in the quickest amount of time.

To drive strategic project success, executives must show constraint, moderation and discipline to move away from ad-hoc setting of priorities and allocation of resources.

Organizations must establish and educate the executive team on the project capacity of the organization. Once the capacity is set, it must be adhered to through a governance process that will activate new projects based on the capacity just as it would when taking on increased volume in other functional areas of the business.

Why is it when it comes to executing a company's strategic initiatives key leaders lose touch with the basics of volume vs. capacity?

By introducing resource management processes to appropriately allocate resources to replace ad-hoc methods of continually adding projects to people's plates without evaluating their availability to achieve the timelines of the project(s) is a critical first step for any organisation focused on improving strategic project execution. 

So why do so many organisations get Projects wrong?  I think it is because projects are the vehicles of change and change is both challenging and exciting.  Everyone wants to jump in to the new endeavor, be engaged and involved, be part of something that will be visible and will make a difference.  The trouble is live and work in an environment of publicly traded companies, shareholders and quarterly reports.  It's tough to keep focus on a project with lofty goals and a long timeline because the business often changes under your feet.

Building confidence through quick-win successes

Whatever strategies and processes we put in place, the justification for using BPI techniques is seeing benefits starting to materialise. ‘Quick wins’ – that is projects that can rapidly deliver benefits so that people start to believe in the potential for improvement – can play an important part in building everyone’s confidence. They can also provide a great way of testing EDB’s capacity to deliver in delivering change, and provide an opportunity for learning what works and what does not.  Research into Benefits Realisation suggests if EDB has a requirement to deliver cashable efficiency savings, the "quick wins" tend to lie in services with large contract and non-staff costs, rather than areas where virtually all the costs are tied up in staffing, or those where additional income can be generated.

Summary

In order to make sure benefits are delivered from EA or BPI-led projects, we need to think through and put in place a benefits realisation strategy, which will explain:

• How costs and benefits will be assessed.
• The governance process that will monitor their delivery.
• The approach to embedding change into the service planning cycle.

As the changes from BPI start to come to fruition, quick wins can help to build momentum and confidence in more ambitious changes, and test out your growing capability in delivering improvement.

 BPI: the key lessons

Ambition. Without vision of what can be achieved to make local service delivery better, the use of BPI tools can be seen as a technical process that delivers process maps and costings but does not deliver change. Always remember, BPI is the diagnostic that uses evidence in order to determine what needs to change, be it the technology, location, contract, procedures, jobs and / or people.

Strong senior leadership. Like any change project, using BPI tools can feel uncomfortable for staff, so leadership is critical to help realise the benefits from a BPI led intervention.

Good staff engagement. Using frontline staff in the BPI process is particularly helpful to the ultimate implementation and ‘buy in’ to the emerging changes.

Robust project governance. Without a clear and effective governance process, there is a high risk that the potential benefits from changing a process will not be realised.

Dedicate appropriate resources. Building capacity and assigning appropriate resources will maximise the chances of success.

Putting governance in place

The next piece in the benefits realisation jigsaw is effective project and programme governance. This should be centred on a “Portfolio Steering Committee”, with representatives from senior management with a stake in seeing that the programme is a success, the governance structure will:

• Provide the mechanism for prioritising and deciding which projects proceed, on the strength of the business case they have put forward.
• Be able to reassign resources and help out when projects start to drift away from the expected path.
• Identify and mitigate risks and resolve issues that are beyond the control of individual projects to manage.
• Hold projects and service areas accountable for the expected outcomes from their projects.

There is a risk that governance structures for projects and programmes are seen to generate lots of new meetings and paperwork which may overload managers with bureaucracy. This does not mean that project and programme governance structures should be abandoned. It means that the approach chosen needs to reuse existing structures wherever possible, and meetings and reports need to focus on their core purpose so that they can be delivered as efficiently as possible.

Embedding improvements into service planning

Where new governance structures are put in place to keep EA or BPI led projects on track, it is important that they integrate with the existing service planning processes that exist to support EDB’s annual financial planning cycle. Service plans provide the link between your authority’s vision, strategic objectives, plans for change and the objectives of individual members of staff.

Including the projected improvements to service delivery in service plans will ensure that making the improvements happen is tightly tied into the personal objectives of operational staff and allows predicted savings to be factored into budget projections. It also ensures that plans for changes to staffing, including recruitment or removal of posts, can be planned to coincide with process changes falling into place.

How can small staff time savings be realised?

Often BPI led projects identify savings in staff time that have a small impact on a lot of people. These savings are difficult to turn into cost savings as they do not correspond with whole posts that could be redeployed or removed.

When these kinds of savings have turned into a tangible improvement, they should materialize as more work being done by the same number of staff – so taking on additional work at the same time as the improvements are made will make sure that the productivity improvement is not lost as work expands to fill the time available. This is the sort of change that needs to be embedded into service plans to make sure it happens.

It is widely recognised that whilst many EDB projects are effective in meeting efficiency targets and delivering service improvements, the significant investment in new systems, processes and skills is not resulting in release of resource for new service development. It is therefore necessary to put in place a framework to support greater visibility and efficiency in productive time use across the enterprise by identifying the dependencies to release the time savings, and developing a SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Timely) action plan to realise the time savings.

Achieving these requires that enablers such as new skills and new technology are put in place on the one hand, and the business changes as a result of these enablers being put in place on the other. This happens in the context of external drivers (such as relationships with partners, suppliers and the impact of changes to enterprise policy), cultural factors (such as a particular service area’s willingness to try new ways of doing things) and the influence of all the stakeholders (including customers, their representatives and staff) which need to be factored into planning change. So benefits realisation management processes sit at the centre of all this to ensure that the benefits are finally delivered.