In this article, we discuss what a single view of strategy is, why it is critical to help organisations become well-managed, and how it can be used to create a significant strategic edge. We also examine the key organisational roles that have a vested interest - and some approaches to building one in your organisation.
Introduction
In every organisation I've ever worked in - from global multinationals to smaller organisations - one of the things leadership teams consistently struggled with was creating a single, live, integrated view of the execution of strategy across the organisation.
We lacked clear visibility of the status of goals, objectives, and measures of performance linked to our strategy, and then the underlying detail of day-to-day execution that delivered against it. Very frequently, detailed delivery information was distributed across many different project and agile systems used by different teams depending on their preference and ways of working.
This information had to be aggregated together to obtain a meaningful view of the real status of execution - somehow linked to the outcomes we were trying to achieve. Many of these systems had either implicit or explicit dependencies which few people, if any, understood in detail. As a result, it was very difficult, if not impossible, to understand the latest status of all strategy execution and what that meant for the progression of our organisation's performance.
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What is a single view of strategy?
When we talk about a single view of strategy, we are referring to the structured framework that defines how to link your objectives and organisation performance measures to the strategic initiatives that are supporting their delivery - and then into the execution of programmes, projects, and sprints.
It is a way of combining information together in a structured and interrelated model which enables both the people leading the organisation and those people involved in delivery to share a single view, so that everybody can understand the work that is being delivered and how it contributes to the strategy.
Through the linked structure, it enables you to navigate from any point in the model to any other. For example, you can link from objectives and goals to the work delivering those goals, map from the people doing the work to their contribution to outcomes, or link benefits to performance - and so on.
Why is single view of strategy important?
A study by PMI in 2013 showed that one of the biggest hallmarks of strategic failure is that people involved in executing the strategy frequently don't understand what the strategy is or their role in executing it. As a result, when things get busy, people largely go back to the familiar day job.
By creating a single view of strategy, it means that everybody is working from a common, consistent understanding of the strategy and how to execute it. The leadership team who set the objectives have direct access to see how the strategy is executing. Teams responsible for delivery have a good understanding of the desired outcomes and can track their contribution to the organisation's performance.
Perhaps most importantly, a single view of strategy allows you to focus all the work across the organisation on the outcomes and objectives you're seeking to achieve - reducing spend on non-strategic projects and focusing resources on activities that will drive the strategy at the greatest speed.
The implications of failing to create a single view of strategy
Without a single, common, integrated view of strategy, the chances of successfully executing strategy fail for several reasons:
- Different groups of stakeholders have different understandings of what the strategy means, creating inconsistent, intuition-led decisions that run a high risk of being wrong.
- When challenges arise, it makes it difficult to understand the root cause and drill into the detail.
- Monitoring and governing the strategy becomes slow and time-consuming as data needs to be manually integrated and assessed.
- The overhead required to integrate the data tends to fall to a single team (often PMO or Strategy). This team is often overworked and dealing at a low level with significant amounts of data.
- The leadership team can't get to the detail to bridge the gap between strategy intent and execution reality.
The overall impact is that the leadership team don't get the information they need to make data-driven, effective decisions in a timely fashion - resulting in highly suboptimal decisions based on poor data that cannot easily be validated.
Using a single view of strategy to create an edge
Creating a single view of your strategy gives you the following major benefits which, when combined, provide a strategic edge over most other organisations.
The ability to focus your effort, resources, time, and energy on the activities that drive the biggest outcome.
Speed in reporting, analysis, problem diagnosis, predictive planning, and execution. Reduction of wasted time on activities that add little or no strategic value.
The ability to know what you're doing and to be able to articulate what will drive the goals and objectives.
Not just feeling like you're going in the right direction, but the assurance through data to support, guide, and direct the work you're doing.
Lessons of history
Throughout my career, I tried to use a range of technologies and integration layers to create a consistent single view of strategy. The most successful approach was the creation of a common set of integrated data stores aggregating execution data together and providing an interactive dashboard. Building this required a significant team and dedicated investment - and the result was still a system that was partially integrated, brittle, inflexible, and most importantly, unable to allow the leadership team to effectively drill from objectives into the detail of delivery in any meaningful way.
Desktop-based data visualisation tools like Microsoft Power BI and Tableau can only provide a relatively static snippet of the strategy picture and often misrepresent much of the real detail required to understand what's working. The fall-back for many organisations - large spreadsheets - fails to scale, is very difficult to update, and can only ever be used by a small cohort within the organisation.
Better ways of creating a single view of strategy
Because of these historical challenges, we set out to solve this by creating StrategyWorks - a dedicated platform where we embed a best-practice strategy execution framework. This simplifies much of the complexity of strategy into a single model, successfully battle-tested in global enterprises through to small organisations.
In this model, everyone can be confident that their view seamlessly integrates with other views and working can be fully linked to outcomes. The leadership team can navigate from high-level objectives all the way down to individual delivery activities - and back up again.
Create your own single view of strategy
We would love to discuss your situation and give you the benefit of our experience of what has worked in other organisations.