 According to CEB Global, more than 50% of the time companies spend on strategic planning is wasted. How could a process viewed so critically be executed so ineffectively? Through my experiences, corporate strategic planning includes a large cafeteria list of priorities. A significant number of people get caught up in the planning process. One can see the time wasted like debris on the side of the road.
Kris Dugan, in his article “5 Ways Your 2017 Strategic Planning Process Could Fail”, shares some insightful warning signs that your strategic planning processes will join the ranks of wasted efforts. 1. Strategic Priority Strategies > 5 The key issue is focus. According to Harvard Business School, only 55 percent of middle managers can name any of their company’s top priorities. That is amazing and points to an unengaged leadership team. If the percentage of misaligned managers is that high, consider the awareness percentage downstream in the organization. Limit the number of company priorities to five and ensure everyone from the C-Level level down are clear on the focus. Less is more. 2. Success is not Measurable Without specific and measurable objectives, the definition of success is up to the interpretation of individuals. Employees need transparent and quantifiable success definitions before committing to them. The goal line could be an unbelievable stretch goal, or even worse, a moving target throughout the year. Without confidence of the end game, people will stay on the sidelines. 3. Lack of Initiative Ownership and Accountability Missing clear ownership, the company’s strategy is driven without a rudder. Employees disengage because they do not feel accountable for their own goals. This drives unfinished initiatives and lack of measured progress. At the beginning of each year, identify owners for all major activities and get people committed. 4. Insufficient Resources of Strategic Priorities Plans without budget and resources are not executable. From a military perspective, this is like General Eisenhower planning for WW2 D-Day but not having the military personnel/arsenal to carry out the strategy. Implementing an execution plan on top of maxed out resources will have the same result. Resource the priorities. 5. Corporate Teams are not Aligned A company can achieve clarity, measurable objectives, accountability, and budget allocation but still fail. I have experienced tops down imposed strategies not bought off across the leadership team. Companywide communication can prevent misalignment. An organization can have the best staff in the world, but if not aligned and coordinated, failure is almost ensured. Companies that incorporate these planning principles into their DNA elevate the probability of amazing results.
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 Project management (PM) teams focus on delivering technical, customer, or internal process projects on time, on budget and with exceptional quality. While there is no scarcity of projects within any organization, there are shortages of project managers to drive them. A common solution is to load the PM team’s plate to the point of missed delivery dates, burnt out people, and disappointed customers.
Assuming quality hiring for the existing team, there are three options to address this: 1) Hire more PMs (full or part time) 2) Reduce the number of projects 3) More effectively leverage the existing team For the first option, most organizations do not have the affordability. Typically, there is limited political appetite to prioritize and reduce the number of projects to align with PM bandwidth. The most cost effective solution is to elevate the capabilities of your existing team to yield more productivity and improved morale. In his article titled, “Project Overload: Are You 'Killing' Your Best People?”, Duncan Haughey lists several ways to elevate PM capability with a focus on spreading knowledge across the team. 1) Classroom Training Formally expand the PM team's knowledge of traditional project, goal and time management. Use your in-house expertise, external trainers or a combination of both to deliver the training. 2) External Certifications If the type of projects being driven warrants skills supported by professional certifications, setup vehicles for your PM members to rise to the occasion for the benefit of themselves and the company. Let your company fund those interested to enhance their capabilities i.e. PMP, Agile. 3) Internal Certifications This approach can support certifications fine-tuned to meet your PM organizations’ skills and competency requirements. Internally develop courses that certify PMs with company recognized level names i.e. gold, silver, and bronze or expert, professional, and team lead. Company projects can refer to the certification type and equivalent competencies required to successfully manage the project. 4) Brownbag Lunches Use informal lunch gatherings to bridge the benefits of social interaction and cross knowledge sharing. This is a great way to build camaraderie and provide sharing of information vehicles. 5) Peer Partnering/Working Together This is especially effective when you have many experienced and junior level people on the team. Peer partnering helps promote mentoring and a culture focused on total team success vs. individual success. Your staff are your best assets so be sure to leverage them for both project management and team development. 6) Brainstorming I added this one to Duncan's list. Tap the expertise of your team for some deep dive brainstorming on some of the biggest PM issues facing the team. For example, setup a multi-hour forum to develop ways to resolve a bandwidth problem. The session could highlight novel responsibility sharing and delegation ideas. With a safe environment, it is amazing what solutions people develop. Encourage “out of the box” thinking. These approaches are positive ways to deal with project management resource scarcity that both benefit the business and the team.  The background hero of a successful sales organization is Sales Operations with a focus on four strategies. An article by Bertil Chappuis and Brian Selby of McKinsey & Co. titled “Looking beyond technology to drive sales operations” provides great guidance. The 4 strategies: 1. Enabling your sales team 2. Take a leadership role 3. Create centralized organizations for core functions 4. Set a high bar for talent Focus on enabling your sales team Through sales enablement, operations can simplify processes to reduce the non-value added efforts and improve sales team effectiveness. Some examples include simplification of bid approval requirements, CRM streamlining, systematizing compensation/goal planning and account planning reengineering. Sales operations must spearhead many sales impacting process activities. Take a leadership role Sales operations team successes derive through their effective influence on the sales organization. Operations owns leading the sales planning, pipeline, forecast, and business reviews. The Sales Operations leader should be the COO and key business partner to sales management. They are uniquely positioned to holding the sales team accountable for delivery on their commitments. Create centralized organization for core functions When experiencing global business expansion, companies often scale through decentralization through lower cost countries. Many deal cycle processes are operationally managed in disparate ways. While costs are managed, sales support grows inefficiently and less than optimal. To address, consolidating operations support should lead to a corresponding reduction of head count while reducing duplicating efforts, process confusion and better operations accountability. Set a high bar for talent Typically, sales operations are seen as overhead. As a result, staffing levels are low while they simultaneously handle continuous improvement and running the business. Teams comprise heavily of junior analysts who excel in reporting/modeling but weak in change management and influence capabilities. A more balanced and experienced team is required with a high potential leader. Incorporate some key rotations from the sales team. An exceptional sales operations team must include outstanding talent and maintain a pipeline of effective performers. In summary, raise the bar of the sales operations team. Match expectations with appropriate staffing and investment decisions in this team.  Why is transparency so important? It builds trust and credibility, both requirements for effective leadership. It means free from deceit and characterized by visibility and accessibility to important and relevant information. We all can identify some prominent companies and individuals that have demonstrated a lack of transparency. Some examples include: Volkswagen Fraudulent emission testing British Petroleum Lack of accountability in oil spill Scott Thompson Ex-Yahoo CEO. Lied about degree on resume Lance Armstrong Lied about taking sports enhancement drugs The Operations team plays a very important role to foster transparency as “trusted advisors” to the decision makers of an organization. We are looked upon to provide accurate analysis, data driven recommendations, and honest feedback. To foster transparency, there are 5 rules for Operational leaders to follow: 1) Be truthful about the business Don’t lie, communicate half-truths, or sit on relevant information. 2) Be forthright with problems and risks Communicate issues on a timely basis. Problems do not age well like wine. 3) Provide business opinions based on data driven analysis and sound judgement Avoid recommendations based on strictly intuition. Earn the title of “trusted advisor”. 4) Provide accurate, relevant and critical business information. It is very difficult to make decisions without free flowing information. 5) Be accessible Don’t be invisible. Be relevant. Be credible. The Operations team has a unique opportunity to foster a culture of transparency and help build a trustworthy and credible organization.  At every company or organization I have been part of (public and private), strategic plans are developed to define an organization’s objectives, goals and high level approaches to achieve them. Strategic Plans many times are developed by the few for the many. In other words, a narrow band of people create a plan based on some high level assumptions often passed down from above. This is not entirely a bad thing. Having a large percentage of your organization developing their own bottom up strategies is not optimal. However, leaving behind valuable “out of the box” thinking squanders the brilliance of the people an organization pays dearly to assemble. How should we address this trade off?
A 1/22/16 article by David Ciccarelli in Entrepreneur.com titled “4 Strategic Planning Exercises That you should do Annually” broaches the topic of addressing the frequent gap of bypassing some bottoms up contributions. The key is to perform these 4 exercises at the dept or lowest level feasibly possible:
When undertaking this effort, you will need to define how low into the organization to go to contribute to this effort. Clearly calendar implications and prioritization of bandwidth must be done for evaluating undertaking a planning process going lower than typical into the organization. You will find increased harvesting of “gems” as Strategic Planning inputs engages a broader cross section of your organization.  Many leads of projects mistakenly take a more limited, myopic view, of what a Project Manager’s focus should be. A project under the control of a PM must deliver a optimum outcome with required performances in quality, timeline and costs.
Besides the outcome, how you handle yourself and get to the finish line matters as well. It could be easier to reach end state by behaving as a bull in the china shop, ignoring other priority projects/programs in the organization, and micromanaging people to bring about a controlled outcome. However, there is a price to pay for putting your head in the sand. A 12/28/15 article by Shane Vaz in PM Time for Project Managers.com titled “ Forget Project Management and Embrace Project Leadership” makes the assertion that the title of Project Manager, misses the boat. What is really required is a Project Leader.
This is not about treating a team with brute force for their own good. But rather, leverage their strengths while building in them the accountability for results understanding the required criteria. I am not supporting blind faith in the abilities of a team, but rather emphasizing that the team will take more responsibility for results, if they are allowed to own solutions and outcomes vs. strictly follow orders. Be a Project Leader.  One of the keys to a successful company is a knowledgeable productive sales organization.
Behind every great sales team are the unsung heroes. There is an organization the Sales team needs in their back pockets, an effective Sales Operations team. A 9/11/15 article by Peter Helmer in Business2Community.com titled “Why an Effective Sales Operations Team is the Key to Sales Success” lays out quite clearly but succinctly the six areas of focus.
These areas are quite broad and impactful to the sales organization. The skill sets required are growing in sophistication in both breadth and depth. I have found that efforts for Processes are often under-vested arms of Sales Operations. Process is defined as “a series of actions or steps taken in order to achieve a particular end.” These need to be not just intuitive, but defined, methodical, tested, and simple as possible to follow. If not, you are rewarded with lost sales, productivity problems, sales team frustrations, and make shift actions taken outside the process just to make things happen. The latter is especially troubling because it contributes to a downward spiral of process credibility and chaos. The solution is to adequately invest in trained resources whose day time jobs are to define and create effective processes with detailed documentation, change management and adoption training. Process development outputs cannot just be a few PowerPoints, Word Docs and a mass email notification. People will do the right thing if they are aware, understand the benefits, and properly trained. Invest upfront on the fundamentals, and increase the likelihood of yielding dividends from an efficient sales team.  We all love lists. Time is short. Everyone has their opinion of Top 10 for everything.
A 6/14/14 article by Susanne Madsen in The PM Hut titled “10 Project Management Dos” lists a very effective list for a review and commentary on. Most are intuitive but a few are worthy of additional focus. The 10 include:
Project Managing involve planning, tactics and relationships. I believe the most understated requirements for success is the relationship. A PM needs the support of the project stakeholders, and support individuals/teams required to deliver on the project. The quality of the relationships will determine the level of support, leeway, and flexibility for the PM to perform his/her responsibilities. Let’s take the 3rd point for illustration. Meeting people face to face. Such a simple step that is often deprioritized due to budget (if people are scattered geographically), limited time (no time for perfunctory visits since we are already behind our objectives), or just a belief this is not critical. The PM must build the personal connections with the customer, decision makers and key contributors to the project. If everything goes well on a project with no constraints, then the relationship factor plays a diminished role. If not, it is the relationship that the PM will rely on to get through difficult phases of a project negotiating alternative solutions, compromises or even failed projects. Bottom line, successful PMs emphasize relationships in a project.  With market place changes happening at lightning speed, some challenge the relevancy of a long term Strategic Plan. According to Jason Fried in 37signals’ book Rework, "What you do is what matters, not what you think or say or plan”. That’s quite a fascinating assertion.
But, Strategic Plans do play an important part in setting up a visionary focus for the company. Complaints about being outdated or being words and not deeds, ignores the need for validating what direction to go into. If you don’t know where you are going, you will get there fast. An article by Michael Allison in Stanford Innovation Social Review titled ”Strategy Needs a Plan” emphasizes that the strategic plan is far from dead—it’s alive and adapting. The problem doesn’t lie with the output, it lies with how we keep it current, relevant and pursue effective implementation. Michael introduces three faulty assertions contributing to the incorrect assumption that Strategic Planning is dead:
Note that all these issues can be addressed:
Have a closer, more regular, business relationship with your organization’s Strategic Plan.  Resource Management can mean different things to different people. For some, it implies a more “strategic” approach taking a high level view of an organization’s longer term needs including skills, location, cost structure and competition.
For others, it is more short term focused to support business and revenue requirements over the next fiscal year. The former is proactive, latter reactive. Thus there is another term for the visionary view, Strategic Workforce Planning. Which type of planning does your organization primarily engage in? A 1/28/15 article by Sue Brooks in HR Magazine.org titled ”Overcoming barriers to strategic workforce planning” provides a good summary of the steps to take for a truly strategic plan involving organizational resource requirements for the intermediate and long term.
What I like about these steps is that it can be applied as a structure for many broader organizational plans. The two that particularly resonate are the steps ensuring organizational alignment.
The other steps involving creating a vision, defining deliverables, leveraging data and continually update are table stakes. But without the stakeholder engagement and internal support, you will have a finished product gathering dust. |
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