Visibility into each investment is established to provide ongoing reliable investment information as well as enable the management to understand the overall portfolio health and effectiveness.
With “VUCA” new normal, shaping a clarified vision is often difficult as it requires alignment at the most senior levels and needs to link to the overall strategic imperatives of the company. It’s important for managers to take a holistic view or an outside-in perspective to understand the complex business environment, customers & varying stakeholders; it’s also critical to align talent, resource with the strategic objectives that businesses need to achieve. Investors should then evaluate allocating capital based on the vision, priority, and capability of the company. The goal is to sustain your vision, overcome barriers on the path to achieve well-set goals with continuous deliveries.
Is the management’s vision stated through the mission statement and strategy: Vision is your point on the horizon, the strategy is how you will get there? Vision is the future you want to realize from a coordinated effort and it is the visual interpretation of what you desire to become, inspiring your stakeholders to look forward and think beyond the current circumstances.
Strategy is the professional breakdown of your philosophy and methodology to achieve something; it is the systematic plan that assists you in employing your efforts towards realizing the vision and achieving the desired output, with optimal utilization of your skill and available resources in the minimum time possible.
Are the road maps consistent with this strategy: The roadmap is the outcome to mind gaps between “TO-BE” and “AS-IS.” If the roadmap is an overall business justification for funding, then the map will be more inclusive with roads and detours describing the business artifacts that make up the road map. The transition plan, or roadmap, is the set of investments, programs, projects and milestones that take you from the current state to the target state. You can define any type of roadmap within the business context by “doing” the exercise of developing a “To-Be” state first, then defining the strategic roadmap based upon the fallout of what has been discovered from that exercise.
There are different types of roadmap depending on the nature of the requirements of stakeholders, some are tactical; some are technical, taking into consideration the technical nuances. If the roadmap focuses on a specific “road” within the map, technical infrastructure or software development, then the map is more tactical and in turn, determines the importance of what artifacts are necessary to define the practicality of strategy management to reach the well-defined destination.
How effectively the strategy has been articulated internally and externally: When communicating a strategy, it is always important to explain the “why” and clarify “what.” Most senior leaders prefer to rush their communication and push the team to do their routine work. But what is more inefficient than a whole organization that attempts to execute a poorly understood strategy? Communication, communication, and communication.
In management practice, spend time with staff to understand their language and the forms of communication that make sense to them. It is important to provide both a high-level vision of the organization’s strategy, then bring it down to specific goals and objectives that are relevant to individual staff members and workgroups via effective communication with varying channels and styles, boost energy for improving strategy management effectiveness.
Is Staff able to execute consistently over time, but allowing for the occasional hiccup: The strategy management success depends on the employees’ ability to execute it consistently. It takes greater transparency, trust, and collaboration leveraging repeatable process, expectation management to improve effectiveness of strategy implementation. Strategic alignment and synchronization can catalyze the flow of the right information to the right people at the right time to coordinate and execute strategy, tactics, and risks.
Very often, companies say yes to all the initiatives, with the consequent lack of focus. This is then spread through the organization, and people no longer know where the priorities are. Due to resource and time limitations, senior executives should say no to many of the initiatives, just choose a few where they will put most of the resources, people of the company. Timing is everything. It is better to execute a strategy that may be even slightly flawed than to keep on spending time/effort/resources formulating the “best strategy.” Making assessment of the staff’s ability to execute with consistency is a critical to make wise investment and enhance vision to realization cycle.
Is the valuation based on financial metrics and projections for future revenues, cash flows and income: You can only manage what you measure. But you need to measure the right things and measure them wisely. Measurement is always the means to an end, not the end itself. Velocity of the strategy execution is an important parameter business can measure the execution success.
Make sure the executive team first understands what it needs to drive future business growth and improve cash flow. Select the right measurement to evaluate, it is important to track the right metrics and know what to do with them to see the performance improvement.
Technically, the performance analysis takes into account financial and non-financial measures, internal improvements, past outcomes and ongoing requirements as indications of future performance. In fact, tracking KPIs and benchmarking are essential to strategy management. The tactical level of measures has to be in alignment with the strategic business goals. Define how you will measure success in meeting that purpose, vision and revenue growth.
The capital investment assessment includes things such as resources consumption, growing tendencies, cost-benefit analysis of business capability development. Visibility into each investment is established to provide ongoing reliable investment information as well as enable the management to understand the overall portfolio health and effectiveness, build differentiated business competencies to improve strategy management success.
