Execution Excellence – Five Elements to Focus On

Culture eats Strategy for Breakfast – Ever heard this common corporate saying? Translation – Having a strategy is not enough, how you execute makes all the difference to achieve business goals and outcomes expected of the strategy.?Strategy execution is done at various levels of a company – enterprise level, business unit level, organizational level, team level and individual level.

Many enterprises, organizations, teams and people fail in executing the strategy because there is no optimal culture for execution. There are several reasons contributing to this lack of optimal culture for execution, two of these reasons are:

1. Strategy is defined top down without empathizing and personalizing it for each external stakeholder (example – customer, partner, supplier, regulator) or each employee (irrespective of the function that employee performs) at a time
2. Not adequately empowering each team or each individual in a team enough to let each team or each team member translate and define what strategy means to them

How can we possibly change above “culture of execution” to successfully execute strategy to produce the business outcomes expected of the strategy?

Strategy definition – A plan of action or a solution or approach for how we get things done.?

The “we” here refers to various levels where strategy is executed or who is executing the strategy – enterprise level, business unit level, organizational level, team level and individual level. Below five steps approach is an effective approach that worked for me that I recommend and implement as part of executing strategy.

1.????Empathize with each stakeholder or stakeholder group as applicable to understand and build trust by identifying and understanding what the top three most important measures for success or value creation.?This is the foundational step for next four steps

2.???? Engage with each stakeholder or stakeholder group to exchange perspectives and views to identify and understand what the motivations, business drivers and business outcomes are

3.???? Explain and align with each stakeholder or stakeholder group on the critical considerations such as the hurdles, pain points, constraints, requirements and challenges to achieve success or value creation and jointly create the strategy for the success or value creation

4.???? Empower other team members and stakeholders who are either partners in executing the strategy or the recipients of the results of strategy execution for taking decisions & sharing the accountability to execute the strategy

5.???? Evidence based adaptation and fine tuning of the strategy set forth in Step #3 by using “data and analytics to measure the success or value creation” set forth in Step #1 applying continuous improvement and digital transformation-oriented product centric mindset using agile development and lean manufacturing techniques.? The evidence needs to be continuously collected and measured to continuously feed into “adaptation and fine tuning of the strategy” for addressing dynamically changing business and market conditions.

Why above approach for execution strategy works?

1. Strategy is part of Execution

Strategy is defined only in Step #3 after Empathizing (Step #1) and Engaging (Step #2) one stakeholder or stakeholder group each time

Strategy is defined by different organizations, teams and individuals in terms of what “strategy means for them” but not what is given or mandated by someone at the top. Strategy execution from bottom up is much more resilient, flexible, adaptive, empowering, personalized per the context and hence effective

1. Strategy is continuously fine tuned and adapted using Evidence based decision making

Some of the techniques and artifacts I use as an enterprise architect in executing above five step-based strategy execution are:

·??????Industry benchmarks and market reports

·??????Customer journeys

·??????Stakeholder maps

·??????SWOT analysis

·??????Business problem scope statement

·??????Business case including ROI

·??????Business Landscapes

·??????Technology and Product Landscapes

·??????Enterprise Architecture – business context diagrams, business architecture, information architecture, conceptual architecture, solution architecture, application architecture, etc.

·??????Industry benchmarks, Metrics, KPIs, OKRs (objectives and key results), and NPSs (net promoter scores) at Product, Business Function, Business Process Level

·??????User surveys, Continuous customer sentiment and experience metrics

·??????Total Cost of Ownership of Solutions

·??????Risk – Operational, Financial, Strategic measures

·??????Cycle Time for delivery

·??????Non-functional requirements for solution delivery

Back to you. What are some of the reasons you have seen for failures in strategy execution? What are some of your recommendations and approaches to ensure successful strategy execution? What are some of the techniques and artifacts you use in performing your role at a company?

(Note:?All the opinions expressed in this post is completely in the spirit of sharing the life and work experiences of the author and not reflective of any of the author’s current or prior employers)