Why strategy execution?
The ONLY platform that integrates Strategic Planning, Portfolio Management, & BI Dashboards.
What is strategy execution?
Strategy execution is the post-planning stage of activity that pushes an organisation towards completion of short, medium, and long-term goals.
The execution phase of strategy brings together your organisations structure, systems, and operational goals, translating strategic initiatives into actionable steps.
Although this may sound simple, an estimated 80% of strategies fail at execution stage, resulting in a huge waste of resource, financial loss, low employee retention rates, and diminished growth.
Strategy execution stats
With a lack of awareness of company strategy, execution is all but impossible. Lack of execution means lack of progression, and therefore lack of user benefit. (Source)
With a mere 12 hours a year spent on strategy, companies are unable to align teams and departments towards a common goal, prioritise tasks, and focus on objectives that generate progress. (Source)
Strategic management, although imperative to success, is often neglected due to 60% of executives struggling to bridge the gap between planning and executing. (Source)
Without a strategic focus, a lot of organisations can be 'busy doing nothing', completing daily tasks that have no impact on long-term company goals.
Benefits of effective strategy execution
- Easily coordinate business activity
- Effortlessly report on strategic progress
- Standardisation of Governance
- Speed of communication
- Visualise progress across various teams quickly
- Cut through the noise to see impact
- 30,000ft visibility of progress & goal status
- Clear prioritisation & ROI
- Vision clearly cascaded to activity
- Add comments or reactions to strategy progress
- Empower teams to work towards company goals in the most effective way
- Gain 360 context of goals and tasks
- Give wider recognition of contribution towards success
- Align your teams through data
Are strategy execution tools right for you?
Sadly, without executive and management buy-in, any change in strategy execution procedures often fail.
To gain the momentum needed, ask yourself if your exec team are aware of the need to for change, desire to support that change, have the ability to support or fund the change, and stamina to sustain the change.
Strategy execution tools will help you align objectives, track progress, and coordinate goals, but not create the strategy for you.
Your strategy does not need to be cut into quarterly periods, or broken down into various initiatives to drive overarching company goals, but you must know where you want to go, and roughly how to get there to benefit from tools.
If you're contemplating using SaaS tools for strategy, you have to understand the benefit you want to gain.
Automation of manual tasks, boosting collaboration, increasing customer experience, or cutting costs? Before starting with SaaS tools, you should have internally audited what you need to change.
Important tips for strategy execution
Business without measurable and well-defined goals won't succeed.
Be patient but be obsessed about improving every cycle on both goals and the initiatives driving them!
Start with the rationale for goals, monitor performance, and communicate any changes throughout.
Communicate until your teams are tired of hearing about goals, and then tell them again!
Harbour transparency and context on all levels. If people have the right information they are able to make right decisions
Strategy formulation can be done by a small group in management, but the execution really must belong to the whole business
Documenting Strategy into a tool that enables periodical progress review and changes is a must
Start simpler and smaller that you think, then scale it out over time
The sooner the wider team understand the purpose of strategy execution tools, the sooner they will see how their work affects business goals.
How we proved Just3Things works
Developed from within OVO Energy, Just3Things was instrumental in maintaining the company's competitive advantage as it rapidly scaled from 5 to over 5,000 people spread over 6 offices. The software saved OVO more than £3m a year in lost productivity and endless meetings.
