Steps of strategic change Determine the need for change. When seeking strategic change, an organization must identify what needs to change. Changing business strategies generally involves analyzing your current business practices and determining where and when adjustments are required. Adapting your business model involves risks, so plan ahead and consider alternatives before taking any steps to modify your company's strategic plan.
Introduce changes slowly and be prepared to return to your previous strategies if the new strategies don't work for your business. Towards the end of the first year of the plan, you should do a more in-depth review to create an action plan for the next 12 months. During the final year of the strategic plan, you'll need to create a new plan for the next planning period of two or three years. The new plan should be in place as the existing plan approaches its end, to ensure that the transition goes smoothly.
Once you identify the projects to prioritize, plan the specific steps to complete them in a new action plan that covers the next 12 months. This should include a schedule, KPIs, and who will carry out each initiative. It's one thing to capture a series of topics on paper, and another to actually use them as a basis for corporate strategy. To do this, the company follows several implementation steps.
First, through the strategic themes of their strategic map at the corporate level, senior executives articulate the theory of corporate advantage, according to which the whole is more valuable than the sum of the parts. Second, they assign a senior executive responsible for each strategic issue. Usually, this executive also has another line or position of staff, since owning a theme is a part-time job. The role of the theme owner is coordination and oversight; the ultimate responsibility for execution lies with the business units.
The owners of the topics monitor and approve the way in which the objectives, measures, and goals of the topic are applied to the strategic maps and to the dashboards of the operating units. They convene regular meetings, in which people from all affected business units participate, to review progress and initiatives and review action plans related to the objectives of the topic. In addition, they oversee the presentation of data and use it to hold fact-based conversations with business unit managers about their support for the topic. In this way, all business units are responsible not only for their local performance, but also for their contribution to strategic priorities at the corporate level.
Change is the only true constant in business. Having defined processes in place to effectively manage change can help companies maintain success. Since strategy drives portfolios and not portfolios drive strategy, tomorrow's transformative leaders must motivate and encourage continuous improvement through continuous change in order to achieve successful and significant results in their projects, portfolios and businesses. EPMOs and business leaders must strive to successfully identify, manage effectively, measure accurately, closely monitor and clearly communicate changes and change management strategies across their organizations.
This will facilitate and drive business strategy in a way that positions your organizations to achieve and maintain the levels of success they envision. To see the power of a strategic theme, think of a large financial services company whose value proposition is to offer a full range of affordable products and services to the mass market. DuPont's Engineering Polymers (EP) division created a strategic map at the corporate level that consisted of five different themes, each represented by a vertical chain of cause-and-effect relationships that encompasses the four perspectives of the comprehensive scorecard. After five years of accelerated acquisitions in an industry with a rapidly changing business model, managers realized that they were still losing ground to boutique competition.
To ensure that those steps could be completed quickly, efficiently and with a minimum of rework, the organization invested time, resources and talent in the first step of the value chain to ensure that the initial purchase strategy produced a clear and flexible direction for the product. By contrast, the diversified company Ingersoll-Rand uses a corporate strategy map and a comprehensive scorecard to promote what CEO Herb Henkel calls “dual citizenship”, in which all employees are not only members of their individual business unit, but also have a responsibility to contribute to corporate priorities. By translating the assumptions of a strategic topic into linked objectives and measures, executives can test the strategy and determine if causal connections really exist. Experts in operating model design have long known the importance of aligning a company's operating model with its business strategy.
Instead, when answering the four questions that link strategy to the organization, executives realized that a very different approach would help them achieve their objectives. Several years ago, that country's executives adopted a strategy to differentiate their airline by reducing costs for passengers and, at the same time, maintaining a high-quality customer experience. .
