For executive teams and their boards
Turning strategy into action
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 sets out
- The team structure around it, from initiative sponsor to steering group
- Tracking light enough that you do not need consultants to run it
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As featured in
- Forbes
- Financial Review
- Expert360
- Clutch
- Eloquens
The gap
The gap between the strategy and its delivery
Management teams tend to be pulled back into running the business, cross-functional initiatives fall between functions, budgets are reallocated, and momentum is lost.
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.
Why 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. The people who had a hand in shaping it tend to be the ones 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 have little spare capacity. Where one finance lead is needed in three places, the work has to be phased.
Lack of collaboration
Execution cuts across functional boundaries. A change to how customers are served affects 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 covering 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 sets out.
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 be tracked through delivery.
04
Resources
Named people, chosen against the time they can give it alongside their current workload.
05
Financials and KPIs
The benefits expected, the assumptions under them, and measures that make progress visible.
If the initiatives needed to execute a strategy are hard to identify, the strategy itself is not yet clear enough. The same test applies to the tracking. If consultants are needed to run it, it is too complicated.
The report
The method you can work from.
It works through the 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 is a private equity backed business that reversed a decline in revenue and tripled earnings over three years.
Implementing Strategy
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