By Jenna Sedmak - September 23, 2022 Show Words: 1063. Reading time: 5 mins. One of the most common questions we get asked after working with organizations to develop their strategic plan is: “How can we connect our strategy to our business operations?” Before connecting organizational strategy to business operations, it is critical that senior organizational leaders have a plan in place for how they will tackle their strategic plan implementation and how they will build the capacities within their key leaders, middle managers, and people to continue sustained strategic thinking and execution throughout the plan duration. Whether organizations work with our team to guide them through their strategic plan implementation or they lead the strategy implementation cycle themselves, it’s critical that there is a clear schedule in place to ensure that momentum is not lost, and your strategy ultimately executed. Once an organization has begun the strategy implementation process, it’s important to review the strategic plan to ensure that the key leaders and teams are aligned around the organization’s vision, mission, values, and strategic priorities. If not completed within the strategic planning process, it’s important that measurable goals with KPIs as well as action plans are developed to ensure that specific outcomes can be monitored and tracked on an ongoing basis. We can help you align your team around a clear vision, mission, values, goals and action plans, so you can lead your organization more effectively and get better results. Balancing Strategy & Operations Once this is all in place, senior leaders can begin to think about how much of their time should be spent on the strategic implementation process (working ON the business) and how much time should be spent on the day-to-day operations (working IN the business). While there’s no perfect ratio, many organizations benefit from an average split of 20% strategic time and 80% operational time, which often leads to a strong balance of critical work taking place, with enough time allotted to reaching key organizational goals and milestones. Individual ratios may differ. For example, a CEO may spend 50% of their time on strategic work, while a production worker may spend 5%. This ongoing balance is important, as strategy and strategic thinking considers the mid to long-term (making calculated decisions that balance future direction, risk and competitive advantages) while operations considers the short-term (doing the essential day-to-day work to ensure the organization keeps moving). Strategy is what can help refine your future products, services, systems, and processes to enhance operations in the long run. While that’s one potential ratio, it’s important to recognize that strategy and operations aren’t always divided. When implementation is done well, many elements of your current strategy are either achieved or eventually integrated into your business operations. How is Strategy Integrated into Business Operations? We focus on building 6 Critical Capacities within leadership teams not only to help them with their strategic plan implementation and goal accomplishment but also to help them deepen the connection between what they’re reaching for strategically and what they’re doing operationally. We look at it as implementing the plan and developing the right environment around the plan to support a successful strategy implementation process. Here are the 6 critical elements for successful strategy implementation.
If you focus on these six critical capacities for strategy implementation, your organization will be more likely to achieve your goals, have strong alignment up, down, and across your organization, and thus connecting multiple elements of your strategic plan to your core business operations. One way to gain the most impact while implementing your strategic plan and building your organizational capacity is to work with specialized consultants and coaches to help guide you through the process, offering an extra layer of accountability and subject matter expertise in strategy, leadership, and implementation every step of the way. Alternatively, a senior leader may decide to lead the implementation and support capacity building with their team. The question we’d encourage you to ask yourself is: “How much is the success of this plan worth to us? And what is the cost of us not accomplishing the plan?” For many of our clients, whose projects and visions have aims in the tens of millions of dollars and whose organizations employ hundreds of staff, the cost of not implementing the plan successfully is quite high. Having the right implementation plan, the right resource allocation and the right alignment between strategy and operations are a couple of ways to increase the likelihood of realizing that economic benefit and realizing your strategic vision.
Is there a relationship between strategic planning in strategy implementation explain your answer?The strategic plan addresses the what and why of activities, but implementation addresses the who, where, when, and how. The fact is that both pieces are critical to success.
What is the relation between implementation and planning?Implementation planning is the counterpart to a strategic plan. If the strategic plan details what strategies you will use to hit a specific goal, the implementation plan is the step-by-step guide for how those goals will be achieved.
What is the relationship between planning and implementation of change?Integrating action planning within the strategy makes the implementation of change to be efficient. This is due to the fact that action planning enables a breakdown of the entire strategy. Implementation of change within an organization requires the presence of an efficient organizational structure.
What is the role of planning in strategy implementation?Planning is the first step involved in system implementation. It is the very basic function which describes effectively the very basic questions of how, where and when the objectives can be realized or it serves as a guiding framework.
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