Effective execution

Separate strategic and operational meetings

Keep your strategy meetings and your operational meetings separate. Otherwise operational issues will swamp your strategic issues.

  • Start each month with a monthly strategy meeting. Check your strategic themes and review progress with your Wildly Important Goals (WIGs). Are you on track? Address no more than three WIGs thoroughly. Do not discuss operational matters. Make it a rule not to do so. The MD or Chairperson should set an example.
  • Hold a brief strategy and operational review meeting in the middle of the month to establish whether everyone is on track. If you or your managers have done nothing to advance your strategic WIGs it is best to find this out while you still have two weeks left of the month to do something about it. Too many companies let a month slip by of only focusing on the urgent.
  • Hold a weekly one-hour meeting. Address two or three important operational issues which build your business and which relate directly to your strategic WIGs. Attend to lesser operational issues in one-on-one meetings. Do not waste the time of all concerned by adressing trivial issues in a room full of people.
  • Hold a 10-minute stand-up operational meeting first-thing each morning, coffee mug in hand. Stand-up meetings are brief, trust me. Determine the outputs of the day. What will make the day successful?

Institutionalize an effective process

The process of developing a BSC, of execution and review is more important than the paper which it produces. The Balanced Scorecard is rightly described as strategy development and execution system. It is also a productivity and measurement tool. However, if you do not have an execution process which is endorsed by all on your team and is institutionalized, the BSC (or any other strategic planning approach) is meaningless.

ABPLAN recommends a specific process pattern:

Strategic

Arrange an annual scenario planning workshop (one day) and directly thereafter create a Strategic Plan and develop a Balanced Scorecard (BSC) (one day) in dialogue with your core personnel. If yours is a small company, involve everyone.

  • Scenario planning is best done without paper and worked-out proposals. Do not arrive with PowerPoint presentations. (The facilitor could use one if it concerns process.)
  • Ensure that you include an item about your process of review and replanning. Is the process working?
  • Install a series of meetings: Monthly, weekly and daily - for review and replanning
  • Decide on outcomes in these two workshops. Wrap up your discussions properly with clear decisions, assigned responsibilities and tasks to be delivered against due dates
Repeat this workshop every six months.

Operational

  • Hold a separate workshop on purely operational matters

"Wildly Important Goals" (WIGs)

Develop only three breakthrough objectives per 12 to 18 months, called "Wildly Important Goals" (WIGs)" (Stephen Covey - The 8th Habit. Jim Collins calls them Big Hairy Audacious Goals (BHAGs)).

Visualize the outcomes with your team as everyone must know them. Everyone needs to commit to making personal contributions in reaching them. Monitor progress thoroughly during your monthly meetings. Ensure that everyone knows that you mean business.

Projects

Manage major objectives as projects - using a standardized project approach. Most major objectives absolutely need the governance structure of a project. This structure ensures that activities happen within an agreed upon time-frame and that the anticipated outcomes are delivered.

Complexity

Some psychologists state that it is not possible to achieve more than three major breakthroughs per year. They point to the cognitive limitations of man to handle complexity. It has little to do with the intelligence of the individual. Successful organisations can only handle a few major complex organisation-wide changes at a time. Aim at achieving a maximum of three major breakthroughs each 12 to 18 months.

One to three "build-the-business" objectives

ABPLAN recommends that the monthly Balanced Scorecard should contain no more than one to three major strategic objective (related to a WIG or WIGs) per manager per month. With one objective there exists an 80% probability of success; with two 60% and with three 33%.

Each manager is personally responsibile and accountable for driving action and obtaining results concerning these one to three objectives. Ask: "What difference do you personally intend making?"

Link results to your company's reward and promotional system. MDs do not be nice. No results, no bonus.

Use your Outlook Calendar

All tasks emanating from major objectives and WIGs need to find their way to your calendar/diary. Such tasks compete with appointments. Make it a practise when working with your BSC to immediately transfer such tasks to your calendar on Outlook.

Find day- and time-specific slots. If this does not happen, execution will be haphazard.

You simply have to ensure that attending to important BSC tasks become part of your daily routine. Each MD and manager should allocate at least three hours per week to purposefully growing your business.

Collaborative Web sites are becoming important effectiveness tools to team members who need to function together over small, large and global physical distances.

 

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Last modified: 24-06-2009