A recent Harvard Business School blog outlined key flaws in strategic planning.

1. Skipping rigorous analysis
2. Believing strategy can be built in a day
3. Failing to link strategic planning with strategic execution
4. Dodging strategy review meetings

#3 is the heart of the Strategic Execution Framework we use for training, consulting, and workshop design.   Working with clients over the years this is one of the key challenges all organizations make and are not always fully aware of.  Specific actions (which are part of the IPS Strategy Execution Mapping Workshop) to address weak or missing linkages include:

• create a clear, concise understanding or what the strategy is
• have a rigorous, understood-by-all definition of the organization for which the strategy is being executed (e.g.,use is/is not matrices for this).  This may be an entire organization or a business unit.
• determine the customer clusters for that organization, both internal and external.  Being absolutely clear about the customers that are the focus of the strategy is critical
• understand the culture and structure of the organization in which that strategy needs to be executed
• plan the project-based work (PBW) required to execute the strategy given the customers, the culture, the and the organizational structure
• map the PBW against specific strategies and the associated organizational competencies
• EVERY project and EVERY operation should be  linked with the specific strategies and customers they support
• look for missing work, duplicate work, or work that does not align and/or fully support the organization’s strategy

The Executing Your Strategy in Challenging Times blog created by IP Solutions LLC (IPS), based in Silicon Valley, California.  Our focus is fusing the power of real world experience with the world class, cutting edge research provided by our partner, Stanford University.  Stanford’s Center for Professional Development and IPS partner to create and deliver the Stanford Advanced Project Management (SAPM) program on campus, on-line in both instructor-led and asynchronous modes, and on-site globally.

All organizations in all countries face challenging times.  Critical to surviving and thriving in challenging times is ensuring the project-based work (PBW) is planned and executed well.  We concentrate on providing links and guides to relevant web-based resources from both the SAPM program and other global sources with a particular interest in the execution of strategy with project-based work.

The types of topics we will address include:

• The power of project-based work (PBW)
• The Strategic Execution Framework (SEF)
• Ideation – who do you think you are and why that matters
• The vision thing
• Culture – inside
• Culture – outside
• Structures and design for PBW
• Managing portfolios of PBW
• Managing PBW…in the trenches
• Using matrix organization for success
• Creating strategy execution maps
• Transitioning from PBW to operations
• One more tome…why are we doing this (the power of outcomes)
• Who are your customers…really?