How do you translate enterprise strategies into individual accountabilities, and ensure that all the pieces add up to successful execution?

Challenge

In a traditional strategic planning process, executives collaborate on a written plan. Then, these strategies are translated into management performance objectives for the year. Sometimes this is through an enterprise performance management process; in other cases, its left to individual managers.

All this is done at a high level, and the process rarely defines the specific contributions of each managerial group to each strategy. There's no way to really know if all the pieces are in place to ensure effective execution.

Furthermore, this traditional planning process does nothing to ensure that resources are aligned with strategies. It's not clear that managers have all they need to deliver their pieces of the strategy. Again, execution is at risk.

How can a planning process improve strategy execution by clearly defining all the needed deliverables from every relevant group, and aligning resources with those deliverables?

Solution

In most cases, strategies require contributions from many groups within the enterprise. And those involved groups rely on others for various support services.

Consider every group a business-within-a-business, "selling" products and services to peers within the enterprise or to external customers.

In an organization that understands this paradigm, strategy is translated into the set of specific products and services needed from groups throughout the enterprise.

Executives can then check to be sure all the needed deliverables are planned.

As an added benefit, individual accountabilities are absolutely clear. Well beyond the vague language of performance objectives, each manager is signing up to deliver a well-defined result -- a product or service.

This powerful paradigm can be taken a step further with investment-based budgeting. Managers submit budgets that describe the costs of their proposed products and services, and budgets are awarded based on the specific deliverables the enterprise chooses to buy from each group. This ensures that resources follow strategy.

With Investment-based Budgeting, each manager not only understands exactly what's expected of his/her group, but also has the resources needed to successfully deliver it.

Comprehensive solution....