Unless you do have experienced project managers who have managed projects with implications for and support required from people before, it is better to not overreach in terms of planning. Plan the activities in priority order in 90 day blocks. Difficult to do activities which seem to be consuming resources and taking time are the first to be considered for rejection by wavering supporters in senior management. If they a precursor break the activity up into two or more smaller, easier to do activities. Difficult to do/Low impact: Don’t attempt these activities either unless they are a precursor to activities with a higher impact on the goal.Poor outcomes in the execution of activities are sometimes enough to derail the whole strategy, especially when some members of senior management are not fully supportive of the strategy. Difficult to do activities are the ones most likely to result in a poor outcome. Difficult to/High impact: Spend time planning these activities.Getting some runs on the board with these activities will help convince wavering supporters of the strategy to follow through with more difficult to do activities. Easy to do/High impact: Prioritise these activities as the first to do.Easy to do/Low impact: Only do these activities if they are a precursor to an activity which has a greater impact on the goal.This may require some movement of the activities within the matrix.Ĭonsider each quadrant of the matrix in turn and prioritise the activities: Plot the activities on a matrix where the X-axis is the ease of doing and the Y-axis is the impact on the goal, for example, activities A1, A2, A3 and A4 in Figure 1.Ĭomplete the analysis ensuring that each of the activities is plotted relative to the ease of doing or impact on the goal of completing other activities. Further analyse the activity for the ease of completing the activity on a scale of one to ten where one is easy and ten is difficult. The goal is likely to be the opposite of that.Īnalyse the activities in turn and determine extent to which the activity will impact on the goal on a scale of one to ten, where one is not much and ten is a lot. To be sure that you have a clear single goal, ask what is one measure, the most important measure, which would indicate failure. Most strategies that I see developed do so with multiple goals in mind. Whilst, one would imagine that any strategy has a clear goal identified before the strategy is determined. To develop the matrix from the brainstormed actions it is necessary to know what the goal of the strategy is. As discussed in other articles it may well be useful to include negative brainstorming as well as positive brainstorming in the repertoire of brainstorming tools, especially if the strategy in question is about improving an existing process. To start the process, organisations need to take their strategy and brainstorm the high level actions required to implement the strategy given whatever starting point their organisation has. However, the most common fault I see is a lack of planning to actually translate the strategy into a series of implementable actions, which can be assigned responsible and accountable parties, allocated resources and assessed for risk both from internal and external sources.Ī tool which can help organisations wanting to undertake strategic prioritisation in order to translate strategy into action is the Ease of Doing/Impact Matrix. A lack of capability among managers and supervisors to manage, coach and counsel staff to complete the activities necessary to implement the strategy can be a stumbling block. Reward and recognition schemes which are not aligned to the strategy can make implementation difficult. The culture of an organisation run as separate fiefdoms almost automatically precludes effective implementation of strategy. The reasons behind the inability of many organisations to translate strategy into action are many-fold. there appears to be no strategic prioritisation among the everyday business-as-usual tasks. Far too often in my wandering through senior executive ranks of commercial, government and not-for-profit organisations I find the gap between strategy and action so large that one bears little resemblance of the other.
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