In the retail industry, the checkout lane is sometimes called the P&L finish line. It’s that magic place where goods and services are scanned and connected with a source of payment that the firm receives value. The myriad of actions on the upstream side of that line – advertising, delivery logistics, physical location, merchandising and all the support staff – don’t generate any direct revenue.
Only when the laser sweeps that Universal Product Code (UPC), and that little beep happens, does the retailer enjoy measurable profit from all their investment.
This same model applies to the work I do with firms in the strategic implementation space. All the work that goes into a strategic project only provides a return on investment when that strategy is implemented.
No matter how thoroughly planned, value is only delivered to the firm when it moves from plan to installed actions.
What Usually Happens When it’s Time to Take Action
The typical journey for many strategic projects is to work really hard on the vision, mission, objectives and strategies, then move directly to tasks. I wince when I think of how many times I or my peers used to call “implementation” meetings (during my days as a Fortune 500 exec) and move from the PowerPoint summary deck directly to a brainstorming session on how we can move forward.
What would follow, through no fault of the group, was a somewhat random set of actions that appeared to connect the intent to an action that would move us one step closer to actual results.
We’d then group them up by function work via a program management approach to complete. If you’d have polled the room, you’d have found that nearly everyone knew something was missing – it was just unclear how to expose it.
Here’s the problem and the real challenge with this approach:
- Depending on the participants, you’ll get wildly different levels of logic and detail, with subject matter experts going deep on those topics in their wheelhouse.
- Potential leverages with other internal activities can be quickly lost, with several teams pursuing parallel actions.
- The actual connection between action and value is typically very intuitive, but untested, leads to potentially costly investments that may not move the needle.
- The momentum of the group is typically very spotty as it can be quite challenging to tell a compelling enough story to recruit the needed resources from shared services groups that are crucial to success.
You might think of this as two toolboxes:
- The first toolbox used to move from insight to strategy was bursting with tools. These tools help the team to avoid blindspots, bias, and over commitments that would pull them off track.
- The second toolbox that moves from strategies to tied-out tactics and actions was sparsely populated (and in many cases) left to chance – even though this last step is critical to enjoying the value of the strategy we’ve created.
Through no fault of their own, it’s not uncommon for a team to complete a substantial percentage of the roster of tasks and find that the value projected in the business case was not realized.
The hard truth is that superb planning only gets results when it goes across the finish line in an aligned, connected, and leveraged way.
What Can Happen and How it Increases the Value
You may have heard the adage that in a project, the last 10% takes 90% of the time. I repurpose that truth slightly to say that, in strategy, 90% of the value is in the approach to implementation, and that is many times only budgeted to be 10% of the activity.
In my work with firms, we acknowledge that most strategies tend to stop at the 30,000 ft level and need strategic work to build structure down to the runway and deliver the promised results. Just as we use tools to get to the high-level strategy, we have powerful tools that unpack the journey between intent and results.
To share a specific example, there is strong utility in setting up a 3X3 matrix that helps the team think through the implementation in two dimensions: time and the firm’s assets to be engaged. An example of one module we work through:
- from, to, and toward on the time scale and
- people, process, and technology on the asset scale.
This of course is only the beginning of a great implementation plan. In our workshops, we talk about where the best talent, process knowledge, and tech resides, and how we can get access to those to accelerate our results. We develop powerful leverage through on-point collaboration tools that unlock a “downhill” momentum toward implementation.
These activities build our story in a way that the firm can understand and respond to. We look at expectations from our participants and their peers, assuring that beyond the transactional, we are activating them at deep levels to support their needs.
When we are done, the team’s confidence in their ability to execute skyrockets, and they have a robust approach that will allow them to meet the inevitable challenges in stride, making adjustments without altering the impact and direction of the project.
The Next Step is to Get More Out of the Hard Work You’ve Put In
If you’ve read this far, you’ve probably put in the hard work, or are on a team that is doing the hard work and something has triggered a yellow or red flag in the way you are currently executing your project. Or perhaps things are off to a good start and you want to make sure you keep the momentum going. In either case, I keep calendar slots to have quick on-point discussions to get a sense of what you see and how I might be able to help get your project to the finish line.
If this briefing has helped you see things differently, let me suggest you look at the suggested materials at the links below. If you’d like to have a no-strings, 20-minute chat, please use this link to put it directly on our calendars.
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