Pat Mayfield has a nice post on Strategy and execution of strategy. Since the word Strategy is misused many times, let's start with a defintion used in the Balanced Scorecard world, focused on IT functions.
A strategy is a hypothesis that improvement (in some form) can be made through execution of projects, processes, or other changes to the organization to improve the four perspectives of IT functions - Stakeholder, Internal Processes, Learnings & Growth, and Budget.
You can't go wrong if you start with this Balanced Scorecard as a guide. It defines strategic initiatives in each perspective that can be the basis of discussion. Another great starting point is the ITIL V3 Framework and its 5 process areas.
But with that set of strategic initiatives (that's what the ovals are called) in hand, Now What, as Patrick suggests in his post. "How do we get the strategy into operation/"
Let's start with Chester Barnard's advice
“The fine art of executive decision making consists in not deciding those things that are not now pertinent, not deciding prematurely, not deciding those things that cannot be made effective and not deciding those thing that others should decide.”
This quote is from, Functions of an Executive, Chester Barnard, 1938. Barnard laid the foundations of management theory. Bernard is widely credited with having originated the “Systems” approach to the study of organizations. He recognized that in order for the organization to survive in the external environment and to succeed in the long run, it was necessary to sustain cooperation from employees by satisfying the condition of efficiency.
With this strategy map in hand, we now need to define how we will know the strategies are being fulfilling - what are the units of measure for the success of the strategic initiative? Let's starts with the four steps of success.
- The strategy map of the Balanced Scorecard comes first. It says what initiatives must be in place and how each initiative is supportive of each other. The example map doesn't have the lines connecting the initiative, but they need to be there.
- From each strategic initiative, we need to define what capabilities are needed to implement that initiative. Capabilities are not the same as requirements. Defining the capabilities is a process of eliciting what customers needed to deliver value. Here's a process for defining those capabilities. The artifacts from this capabilities creation can be in a variety of forms.
With the capabilities defined we now need to take inventory of the projects in hand or the projects needed to fulfill the requirements needed to provide the capabilities. This is the requirements that implement the Capabilities needed to fulfill the Strategy
