For executive teams and their boards
Developing the strategy was the easy part
A guide to turning a strategy into initiatives, owners and a reporting cycle your own team can run, drawn from twenty years of implementation work.
- How a strategy breaks into initiatives, and what each initiative plan carries
- The team structure around it, from initiative sponsor to steering group
- Tracking light enough that you do not need consultants to run it
PDF, 16 pages. No sales call, and your details are not passed on.
As featured in
- Forbes
- Financial Review
- Expert360
- Clutch
- Eloquens
The gap
The benefits arrive late, or not at all
Management teams get pulled back into running the business. Cross-functional initiatives fall between silos, budgets get reallocated, and the momentum goes.
Under 15%
of organisations consider themselves successful at executing strategy.
50 to 90%
is the range of estimates for strategy implementation failure rates.
Sources: Building the office of strategy management, Harvard Business Review; Kaplan and Norton, Creating the office of strategy management.
Six reasons implementation stalls
Unclear strategy
If the strategy itself is vague, translating it into actions is guesswork, and the actions inherit the vagueness.
Lack of alignment
A finished strategy does not mean an aligned one. People who had a hand in it are the people who deliver it.
No clear plan
Buy-in without a plan leaves everyone waiting to be told what their part is.
The day job
Head offices carry little spare capacity. If one finance lead is needed in three places, phase the work.
Lack of collaboration
Execution cuts across boundaries. A change to how you serve customers lands on sales, operations and IT at once.
Culture and communication
Silos limit cooperation, and a deep fear of failure is a barrier to change on its own.
The framework
A plan, a team, and a way of tracking it
One
Planning
The strategy mapped into individual initiatives, each with its own project plan: objectives, milestones, resources and timeframe.
Two
Team structure
A team per initiative, and a steering group over the top of them. It works best chaired by the chief executive, with every functional sponsor in the room.
Three
Process and tools
The mechanisms that show progress against the plan, and surface the issues that put the strategy at risk while there is still time to act.
What each initiative plan carries.
01
Objectives
A short summary of what the initiative is for, in language the rest of the business would recognise.
02
Sponsor
A senior executive who makes sure the work happens, contributes expertise, and clears the obstacles.
03
Workplan
High-level tasks and milestones, at a level that can actually be tracked through delivery.
04
Resources
Named people, chosen against the time they can genuinely give it alongside their current workload.
05
Financials and KPIs
The benefits expected, the assumptions under them, and measures that make progress visible.
If you find you are struggling to identify the initiatives needed to execute your strategy, the strategy itself is not clear enough. The same test applies to the tracking: if you need consultants just to run it, it is too complicated.
The report
Sixteen pages you can work from.
It works through the six reasons implementation stalls, then the framework in full, with a worked example of how one strategy breaks down into parallel initiatives.
The reporting cycle is set out as we run it, including the tracking summary a project lead can update in under five minutes.
One recent example in it: a private equity backed business that reversed a slide in revenue and tripled earnings over three years.
Implementing Strategy
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