How to Build and Execute a Strategy That Actually Works

11/22/17 • 35 min

"If from your strategy you can't identify anything that you would say no to, it's probably not a good strategy." - Karl Scotland Strategy Execution is Hard. Creating Strategy is Even Harder. Are you struggling with too many conflicting priorities? Constantly dealing with short-term unachievable targets that only send the whole team into a total burnout without any real result? You are not alone. Developing a strategy that leads to a successful execution is one of the biggest issues managers report to struggle with today. As revealed in a survey by PwC’s Strategy, which involved 2,800 executives from companies of various sizes, geographies, and industries, 82% of executives say that growth initiatives companies do commit to lead to at least partial waste. Converting strategic decisions into specific actions, allocating resources to support the success of the strategy, achieving an alignment of the day-to-day activities with the bigger objectives and strategic initiatives - all of these are the challenges managers and executives face every day. In this context, how can a leader build a successful strategy that would make sense at every level of business? Unfortunately, as stated in the same survey, almost half of the executives in question decided not to set a specific action at all - 49% stated their company has no list of strategic priorities. Is having no strategy really an answer? How to Build and Execute a Strategy to Get Real Results Today on Lean Agile Management Podcast, we are looking for a definitive answer to Lean-Agile strategy execution with Karl Scotland. Karl is a Strategy Deployment expert and a professional Lean and Agile consultant, who helped clients like BBC, Yahoo, Cisco, and others. In this episode: How to create an end-to-end alignment of tasks, tactics, initiatives, and strategy? How to give autonomy while avoiding a total chaos and unpredictability in execution? How to use feedback to prevent second-guessing, deadly misunderstandings and unalignment? Who is responsible for creating the strategy? What, who and how comes up with the tactics and tasks? How to execute strategy with a focus on true business benefits? TASTE True North Aspirations Strategy Tactics Evidence Using Hoshin Kanri X matrics to visualize the strategy and related work Future backward exercise as a tool for breaking boxed thinking, draw out How get people to buy-into the strategic ideas? Continuous strategy and tactics adjustment and evaluation. How do we know our strategy is (not) working? Failure is absolutely necessary to a strategic success, Why everyone needs to learn to fail Further reading and mentioned resources: What is A3 problem-solving? Understanding Lean model of shared leadership Catchball as a tool for strategic feedback collection What is Hoshin Kanri X matrix? Free downloadable templates of X Matrix and A3's by Karl Scotland Book Recommendations by Karl Scotland: Good Strategy/Bad Strategy Playing to Win Art of Action Turn the Ship Around Future Backwards Guest Details: Twitter | LinkedIn | AvailAgility LAMP or (Lean Agile Management Podcast) is a show by Kanbanize where some of the brightest minds in Lean Agile management talk about how leaders can boost work efficiency, create a culture of high performance, and build teams that thrive. LAMP is available on YouTube and Apple Podcasts.

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How to gain customer's trust with Service Delivery Review?

"Without having the understanding of what customer values, teams are going to turn to vanity metrics " - Matt Philip Who is your customer? Do you truly understand their pains and needs? Did you prove that with the way you build and deliver your products or design your services? The chances are, if you can give strong positive answers to these questions, your customers trust you. If that's so, you can go on to the next article. However, if you don't have clear answers to these questions, you are likely wondering how to build a trust relationship with your clients. This week, we've asked Matt Philip, who is a Director of Learning and Development at ThoughtWorks, to explain the concept of Service Delivery Review. Welcome to LAMP – Lean Agile Management Podcast, a show by Kanbanize where some of the brightest minds in Lean Agile management talk about how leaders can boost work efficiency, create a culture of high performance, and build teams that thrive. LAMP is available on YouTube and Apple Podcasts. "We're not a service company, we're building a product" Even if you are only developing a product, you are still in the service business. If you think building a product has nothing to do with a service or gaining customer's trust, here is what Matt has to tell you: "Most businesses are in the business of both product and service delivery: it's not only what they're delivering but how they're delivering it." Okay, you know your external customers. How about the internal ones? Are you aware of the customers internal to your organization? What are their expectations, needs, and pains? If you've never asked yourself this question, it might be just about time to do this. The things you find out might not be pretty but would you rather let your teams drown in distrust and unproductive metrics or enable them to grow together? Why have you chosen us? Service Delivery Review is one of the proven ways to collect quantitative data on whether what you do, your project goals and values are meaningful to your customer. Is your work aligned with what your customer truly needs? Forget the vanity metrics, it's time to perform a Service Delivery Review. Learn how to collect the quantitative data about qualitative issues and gain the trust of your customers both inside and outside of your organization.

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Transparency, And Why Business Agility Will Not Work Without It

"You are going to see things that you don't want to see... but it's something that you need to do if you want to improve your business." - Annette Vendelbo Would you like predictability in your projects? Would you like to deliver faster and with higher quality? Business agility is no longer a dream of revolutionary organizations, it's the new requirement of the modern economy and free market. However, how do you get there? The key first step is transparency. This time on the LAMP, we are talking to Annette Vendelbo about the need for higher organizational transparency in business. She is the director and founder of Xvoto, an accredited Kanban trainer and Agile coach, as well as a passionate public speaker on the topics of business agility and transparency. Annette has been deeply engaged in project management since 1995. She has been a member of the PMI Denmark Chapter board of directors since 2005 and was elected President in 2011. Her project management experience is acquired working in both private and public sectors, establishing the building blocks that ensure project success in both sectors given their different ecosystem. In this episode, Annette explains why transparency is a quintessential part a healthy organization and why it is an unavoidable step towards real business agility. Lean Agile Management Podcast (aka LAMP) is a show by Kanbanize where some of the brightest minds in Lean Agile management talk about how leaders can boost work efficiency, create a culture of high performance, and build teams that thrive. Contact our guest: Twitter | LinkedIn | Xvoto Can't listen to the podcast now? Here is how Annette summarized the topic herself. Enjoy! Transparency, And Why Agility Will Not Work Without It When I work with clients to help them transform towards higher organizational agility, I get lots of negative reactions to agile key principles. To many, these principles seem counterintuitive to their current way of working. But what disturbs the agile opponents the most is transparency, which is one of the fundamentals in e.g. Scrum and Kanban. And, by the way, a prerequisite for improvement. Even if most buy in to the idea that if you cannot see what happens in your system, i.e. your project, your department, your team, etc. you do not have a baseline for improvements and you cannot react sensibly and timely to whatever is disturbing the flow (=progress) in your system. I often experience that people resist showing what they are working on and how. This happens at the individual, the team, and the managerial level. But why? Well, mainly out of fear of making it visible that: Everyone (managers too) make mistakes We may not handle dependencies very well We might do things that don’t really make sense Some are not as busy as they should be (and pretend to be) We are not in control of our processes We do not produce the results we could To cut a long story short, many don’t want to know and are afraid of discovering what is really going on, because when you get to see “bad stuff” in your system, it might point to something you or your team did or could do something about. It makes you responsible for reacting on what you discover and for not letting the “bad stuff” continue. Where does fear of transparency come from? Well, there are 3 answers: Culture Culture Culture If errors are not accepted in your company, you will most likely want to hide your mistakes. Transparency makes that impossible. If top-down management is the norm in your company, you are not expected to question the orders you get. Even if you can clearly see that they will lead in the wrong direction. Managers that thrive on this management style will work against transparency, as this would put a big finger on the sore spots of their decisions, strategies etc. If it is (silently) accepted in your company that not all employees are equally busy and that some do not assume responsibility or show leadership,