I had an interesting discussion last week where a very capable manager was complaining about being stretched and not having sufficient time to capture the process. Critical information was trapped in the heads of key personnel and this made it difficult for new staff to get up to speed without impacting those experts. Also, many process and ownership related problems resurfaced on a regular basis because there was never time to capture the outcome of the previous debates. Focusing solely on business-as-usual [BAU] is a trap. Few companies want to simply maintain existing performance; most want to improve it in significant ways.
According to Wikipedia, strategy is “a high level plan to achieve one or more goals under uncertain conditions”. Something most of us need to consider on a regular basis right?
Interestingly, I read recently that only 44% of strategic initiatives are successful and that 58% of projects are not well aligned to organizational strategy [PM Network, April 2014]. To me, this suggests a lack of proper focus.
Creating an implementable and coherent strategy should be a critical front-end step in any innovative process; and by ‘innovation’ I mean any change that adds value.