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Strategy roll-out

Making sure your strategy happens

Are you in the position of having thought through and developed your strategy?  You now want to implement it and make sure it happens.

If so, then you are like many of the clients we help.  Most of our engagements start with an experienced management team who have worked on their strategy and know what they want to deliver.

These management teams want some help to make it happen.

Some want a systematic approach to communicating and managing their strategy.  Others want to engage their staff in both left and right brained aspects of their strategy.  Some recognise their existing measures don’t really reflect their strategy and want to ensure that new measures reflect the right behaviours.  Others are looking at the overall alignment of resources, projects, investments and people.  They all want to make sure their strategy is going to be delivered.

Some examples

Clients, are often starting in quite different places, with quite different problems.  For instance, from amongst our client portfolio:

  • Boots the Chemist were rolling out a strategy of cost reduction, alongside innovative new lines, across their whole organisation.  Their Chief Executive wanted to ensure “They got the strategy!” and that it rolled out through all the retail channels.
  • The Executive team of the social care provider, Dimensions wanted to ensure their 2000 staff across 14 regions each understood how they fitted in and contributed to their regional strategy. Their problems were to fit in with their loose tight strategy and the board wanting to compare performance across diverse regions. They also wanted to integrate forthcoming acquisitions.
  • The Chief Executive of the manufacturing company Unite Modular Solutions, (part of the FTSE350 company Unite) wanted to enter new markets and integrate their sales, design, manufacturing and after care operations.  They needed to improve delegation and find ways to attract external customers.
  • Peterborough City Council had a strategy of joined up working that they wanted to implement.  The Chief Executive wanted to ensure that joined up thinking and working happened from her Management team, down.  They also needed a much greater discipline of project control and performance management.
  • At Anglian Water Technology the Managing Director wanted to integrate their new acquisitions to get synergy from the group strategy.  They needed to identify where synergy existed, share knowledge across the group and deliver organic growth.

In all these cases we helped the Chief Executives and their management teams to make their strategy happen.

Strategic Balanced Scorecards (Plus)

In all these cases the clients came to us asking for strategic balanced scorecards that would help them with their implementation.  In each case we implemented the core pieces of the  approach, but refined and adapted the implementation to suit the client’s particular needs.

  • At Boots, the emphasis was first on the management team all agreeing the goals and strategy, then we found £40m worth of savings, from amongst the £10mm of initiatives.  Later we helped the teams focus on both roll-out and keeping a strategic perspective.
  • In contrast, the emphasis with Dimensions was finding a way to engage with their loose tight culture.  The issue was one of providing tools they would want to use that made sense for front line regional managers.  In the end this was so successful we had spontaneous balanced scorecards breaking out.  At the same time we helped the regions to explain their diverse situations to  the board in a meaningful manner, thus helping the board to understand the relative progress each region was making.
  • Both Unite Modular Solutions and Peterborough City Council wanted joined up working.  Neither wanted a significant re-organisation.  In both cases, by identifying joint objectives, and also supporting managers from different parts of the organisation to work together, both were able to make significant improvements in their ways of working and performance.
  • At Anglian Water and Dimensions there were elements of finding synergy and sharing experiences so the regions or business units could help others and improve their own performance.

In all these cases, their strategy relied on finding the right elements that needed changing and improvement.  The systematic balanced scorecard approach to managing strategy helped as a central core in the roll-out.   We added components and emphasis to ensure it worked for these particular clients.

Persistent solutions

Clients are still using our approach many years after we worked with them, demonstrating the effectiveness, persistence and common sense, of our approach.

“Five years on, we are still using the balanced scorecard you helped us develop.
It has been central to building our capability and delivery to our clients.”
Mike Martin, Managing Director, Anglian Water Technical Services

“We continued to follow the strategy you helped us set out , using the Balanced Scorecard,
for the next five to six years. It really helped us as an IT department”
Cheong Yin Ping, IT Department, Overseas Chinese Banking Corporation, Singapore

“The Strategic Balanced Scorecard you helped us introduce [six years ago] is still in use.
It has been fundamental in bringing about change and improvements in the City Council”

Ben Ticehurst, Assistant Chief Executive, Peterborough City Council