Posts tagged ‘business’

A strategy is just a dream if you don’t have a roadmap to follow.

Most companies have a vision, many have a strategy, but so many fail on the execution. Why is that? The most fundamental reason is because of a lack of clear plan, alignment, and change management. If a company has a brilliant strategy, but no roadmap for how to get there- or a lack of alignment across the organization, it isn’t a strategy. It’s a dream.

So let’s talk about how to structure your strategy:

Strategic planning

Articulate your Vision. Start with the end in mind. What do you want to be when you grow up? This can include a conceptual and/or a financial vision. Set your sights high.

Plan your strategy. It starts with workshopping and documenting these key concepts:

1. Who are your constituents? What do they care about? How are you serving them today? How do you want to be able to serve them in the future?
2. What data do you need to support the strategy? Market considerations, competitive set, and more.
3. Where do you need to win to grow?
4. What are the key gaps or areas that you need to build or fix to get there?
5. Where do you need to innovate to deliver compelling value?
6. What tools, technology, people and resources are needed to execute?
7. What has to change? Processes, ways of working, mindset.
8. Alignment: Cross functional commitment & alignment is a necessary step before ratifying your strategy.

Build your Roadmap

1. Strategic plan & Timeline: build out a 1-3 year business roadmap showing the phasing, key projects, technology and features that will be delivered to support your strategy.
2. Financials: what are the investment and return expectations for year 1,2 and 3? How are you going to drive value quickly, while building long term equity?
3. Key requirements: what are the must-haves? The nice-to-haves?
4. Operational needs: Activate the resources, tools and organizational requirements needed to support the first phase
5. RACI: Who are the project sponsors? Who are the core team members? Who’s accountable for what? Responsible?
6. Change management: This needs to start early on to ensure that you have organizational alignment, to enable teams to surface and address concerns or obstacles, identify processes and other challenges that need to be addressed to deliver each project successfully.

Begin to execute:

Once your strategic roadmap is complete, it’s time to execute. At a high level, you’d need to validate your roadmap to assess what’s achievable on your timeline. Align on what’s more important- timeline or budget.

1. Validate your timeline and prioritization for phase 1
2. Create detailed requirements & project plans
3. Identify Program and project managers
4. Identify Vendors or partners
5. Validate RACI
6. Change Management
7. Identify test & learn strategies
8. Scheduled check-ins and executive updates
9. Meet quarterly to review progress against the roadmap, and to validate future phasing.

Assess & evaluate where you need to pivot. What has changed in the marketplace, company performance or other factors? What innovations could be gamechangers?

• Assess & evaluate your roadmap & timeline. Has anything changed that could (or should) impact your timeline or priorities? Consider market forces, company imperatives, innovation…
• You should be prepared to pivot and refine as you learn. Your roadmap is a guideline- not a fixed plan that is set in stone.
• Watch the scope creep- Your program and project managers should keep the team focused on project scope, but inevitably, new ideas will arise. MOST should be put in a prioritized backlog for future phasing. The core team needs to surface and evaluate ideas to determine whether they are in-scope, need to be prioritized for future scope, or worth adding to project scope- considering what you could remove from scope to keep the project on track.

That’s a starter list for you! Feel free to bookmark it.

I help companies of all sizes articulate brand vision, strategies- and to execute. For help with yours, see https://jessjacksonconsulting.com/

For more, watch this space.