Defining the ‘right’ initiatives that align with your strategic priorities
Organizations have limited time and resources – how do they ensure that they focus improvement programs on the rights areas. The answer comes back to the organization’s overall strategic priorities.
An organization may have amazing, executional capabilities but to be ultimately successful the improvement programs and initiatives need to move the organization towards its overall priorities.
Ensuring that you have the ‘right’ initiatives that align back to your strategic priorities requires that you have.
- Clear vision/ strategy of organization’s objectives communicated throughout – without a clearly understood and overall objective for the organization, there is no ‘guiding’ north star
- Cascaded targets and strong understanding of current performance and the gap (to target) – the organization’s planning process then needs to translate the high level vision/strategy into an actionable plan of what is needed year by year
The ‘right’ initiatives are then the prioritised, actionable set of programs/ initiatives that will bridge the gap (to target) – finally, the programs/initiatives implemented should result in the plan being realized and the organization moving towards its overall vision (‘north’ star).
Defining the change vision and change story
The starting point for driving change is a compelling ‘need for change’ clearly communicated to everyone. From the workforce’s viewpoint, the first step of their engagement in the change program is when they hear the messaging around the ‘need for change’. What they hear, how they understand the message and their support of this message will define if and how they embrace the need for change and if they become fully committed and supportive of the change – or not…
However, before you can engage your workforce you need to define what the ‘need for change’ actually is.
The need for change is usually either in the form of
- A ‘burning platform’ – a major crisis threatening the organization’s existence and needing immediate action,
Or, potentially
- The organization’s vision and mission – which might be so powerful that it is sufficient to motivate employees to make the needed changes.
Creating a Plan (from the Vision and Mission)
Creating a strong, effective annual plan should be based on the organisation having a defined underlying vision and mission with supporting strategic, long term ‘break through’ objectives with a longer timeframe – typically 3-5 years or longer.
These strategic, long term objectives are defined and then cascaded to the annual objectives, priorities and measures (as part of an annual strategy deployment/planning process).
Defining prioritised, actionable programs and initiatives that will bridge the gap (to target)
Improvement programs should have well defined goals or objectives when they are created. And those objectives should align with the organization’s strategic targets. Creating the program and then defining the detailed initiatives that support the program are key steps needed before implementation can start.
Key failure modes in the success of an improvement program can essentially be either
- Program did not support strategic priorities
or
- Program initiatives did not deliver sufficient performance uplift (either because the initiatives were not sufficiently actionable or because there were insufficient initiatives)
Ideally,
- Program objectives align with strategic targets
- Initiatives are well defined and actionable
- Initiatives collectively deliver the required program’s objectives