Strategy Services
Demystifying The Concept
There are so many different strategy books and frameworks out there. I've lived the teachings of most of those books and can tell from firsthand experience that they are not one-size-fits-all. If you already have one deployed in the business, great, we can work with that. If you don't, or don't like what you're using we'll work with you to find an appropriate set of tools to match the capabilities of the team and be suitable for the culture.
Ultimately, any strategy project will include a full hierarchy of activities to ensure that you achieve that strategy.
Strategy (before structure)
Strategy definition needs to not be complicated. It often is informed by quantitative and/or qualitative business and market data, insights from organizational challenges, or unmet needs of customers.
Leveraging this information, the business needs to define what are they going to do and document what will you measure to confirm that the strategy is effective.
Structure (before process)
Determining the best right team and organization structure to achieve that strategy is the 2nd phase. Too often businesses rely on their legacy based organizational structure to accomplish their strategy.
Determining the best right organization and team structure enables focus, accountability, and collaboration that will achieve your strategy.
Business Processes (before systems)
Defining business processes comes 3rd. The old adage that "this is the way we've always done it" needs to be irradicated. Roles will change, responsibilities will shift, and some methods will be upgraded or discarded as necessary.
When defining business processes, it's best to start with a clean sheet and think openly about what key processes the business needs to have to achieve its strategy. Remember that it's not about how it's been done in the past, rather how it needs to work in the future.
Systems (before people)
Business systems and tools often are built around a legacy means of doing business. In other cases, the systems were insufficiently deployed and have limited process improvements. Either way, business systems need to work for the business.
The team needs to think critically about how the business systems they'll use will support the processes that they've developed, provide meaningful data about those processes, and add value to the people working within the processes. Without this, the prospect of scalable processes will be dead on arrival.
Finally, People
People to execute the strategy are the most important of all. That said, once the prior steps have been completed, now you know what people skills (and how many) are needed. Now you can prioritize people investments such as education and training, and be informed about the critical attributes to hire for.
People are the most important as they are the most flexible, adaptable, and scalable resources in the business ecosystem.