Essay: Assignment: Strategy implementation

Step 1
Engage all divisions of an organisation in the strategy planning process by ensuring information flow within all visions; from to levels to lower level (upward to downward communication channel should be adopted). Managers must be fully aware of how the company operates and how change will affect operation before formulation of the strategy.
Step 2
Communicate the need and how decisions were made to fill that need. Employees and all stakeholders must understand why the strategy is being put in place and its goals. Change often causes paranoia among employees. Making them feel they are an important part of the change process and educating them about the details will help to create enthusiasm and cooperation instead of paranoia.
Related Reading: What Does Strategy Implementation Involve?
Step 3
Obtain buy-in by all key employees and stakeholders involved in implementing the strategy. No matter how brilliant top management thinks the new plan is, if the production department thinks it is unworkable, they will resist change and the plan will likely fail.
Step 4
Conduct informational sessions or training to achieve a comfort level with new strategic processes and procedures. This is the time to make any necessary changes to the plans as gaps and mistakes appear. Informational sessions often elicit helpful suggestions from staff and line employees.
Step 5
Implement the new strategy with elaboration. It is important that all levels of employees are passionate about the change and feel as though they have been rewarded for their help in bringing it about. There must also be a broad understanding of when the change begins, so create a launch date or schedule that everyone knows and can easily follow
Vague strategy formulation 2. Leaders consider their job is done when they finished with the planning. 3. Left the organization during the implementation. 4. Implementation tasks and activities not defined enough detailed. 5. Top middle management conflicting goals and priorities- middle management tasks modification.
6. Inadequate leadership style: top down or laissez fair senior management, not collaborative management
Strategy Formulation
The first step in forming a strategy is to review the information gleaned from completing the analysis. Determine what resources the business currently has that can help reach the defined goals and objectives. Identify any areas of which the business must seek external resources. The issues facing the company should be prioritized by their importance to your success. Once prioritized, begin formulating the strategy. Because business and economic situations are fluid, it is critical in this stage to develop alternative approaches that target each step of the plan.
Strategy Implementation
Successful strategy implementation is critical to the success of the business venture. This is the action stage of the strategic management process. If the overall strategy does not work with the business’ current structure, a new structure should be installed at the beginning of this stage. Everyone within the organization must be made clear of their responsibilities and duties, and how that fits in with the overall goal. Additionally, any resources or funding for the venture must be secured at this point. Once the funding is in place and the employees are ready, execute the plan.
Evaluation and Control
Strategy evaluation and control actions include performance measurements, consistent review of internal and external issues and making corrective actions when necessary. Any successful evaluation of the strategy begins with defining the parameters to be measured. These parameter should mirror the goals set in Stage 1. Determine your progress by measuring the actual results versus the plan. Monitoring internal and external issues will also enable you to react to any substantial change in your business environment. If you determine that the strategy is not moving the company toward its goal, take corrective actions. If those actions are not successful, then repeat the strategic management process. Because internal and external issues are constantly evolving, any data gained in this stage should be retained to help with any future strategies.
Avoiding the Implementation pitfalls
Because you want your plan to succeed, heed the advice here and stay away from the pitfalls of implementing your strategic plan.
Here are the most common reasons strategic plans fail:
Lack of ownership: The most common reason a plan fails is lack of ownership. If people don’t have a stake and responsibility in the plan, it’ll be business as usual for all but a frustrated few.
Lack of communication: The plan doesn’t get communicated to employees, and they don’t understand how they contribute.
Getting mired in the day-to-day: Owners and managers, consumed by daily operating problems, lose sight of long-term goals. _ Out of the ordinary: The plan is treated as something separate and removed from the management process.
An overwhelming plan: The goals and actions generated in the strategic planning session are too numerous because the team failed to make tough choices to eliminate non-critical actions. Employees don’t know where to begin.
A meaningless plan: The vision, mission, and value statements are viewed as fluff and not supported by actions or don’t have employee buy-in.
Annual strategy: Strategy is only discussed at yearly weekend retreats. _ Not considering implementation: Implementation isn’t discussed in the strategic planning process. The planning document is seen as an end in itself.
No progress report: There’s no method to track progress, and the plan only measures what’s easy, not what’s important. No one feels any forward momentum.
No accountability: Accountability and high visibility help drive change. This means that each measure, objective, data source, and initiative must have an owner.
Lack of empowerment: Although accountability may provide strong motivation for improving performance, employees must also have the authority, responsibility, and tools necessary to impact relevant measures. Otherwise, they may resist involvement and ownership. It’s easier to avoid pitfalls when they’re clearly identified. Now that you know what they are, you’re more likely to jump right over them!
Covering all your bases
As a business owner, executive, or department manager, your job entails making sure you’re set up for a successful implementation. Before you start this process, evaluate your strategic plan and how you may implement it by answering a few questions to keep yourself in check.
Take a moment to honestly answer the following questions:
How committed are you to implementing the plan to move your company forward?
How do you plan to communicate the plan throughout the company?
Are there sufficient people who have a buy-in to drive the plan forward?
How are you going to motivate your people?
Have you identified internal processes that are key to driving the plan forward?
Are you going to commit money, resources, and time to support the plan?
What are the roadblocks to implementing and supporting the plan?
How will you take available resources and achieve maximum results with them?
You don’t need to have the perfect answers to all these questions right now, but just make sure that you’ve given all the questions equal consideration. You don’t want to look back six months from now, and wish you had identified some big issues that are now threatening your success. If you’ve identified some red flags, assess if they’re huge obstacles or small ones. If they’re big, get them out of the way before you implement, even if it means pushing your timeline out for awhile.
Making sure you have the support
Often overlooked are the five key components necessary to support implementation: people, resources, structure, systems, and culture. All components must be in place in order to move from creating the plan to activating the plan.
People
The first stage of implementing your plan is to make sure to have the right people on board. The right people include those folks with required competencies and skills that are needed to support the plan. In the months following the planning process, expand employee skills through training, recruitment, or new hires to include new competencies required by the strategic plan.
Resources
You need to have sufficient funds and enough time to support implementation. Often, true costs are underestimated or not identified. True costs can include a realistic time commitment from staff to achieve a goal, a clear identification of expenses associated with a tactic, or unexpected cost overruns by a vendor. Additionally, employees must have enough time to implement what may be additional activities that they aren’t currently performing.
Structure
Set your structure of management and appropriate lines of authority, and have clear, open lines of communication with your employees. A plan owner and regular strategy meetings are the two easiest ways to put a structure in place. Meetings to review the progress should be scheduled monthly or quarterly, depending on the level of activity and time frame of the plan.
Systems
Both management and technology systems help track the progress of the plan and make it faster to adapt to changes. As part of the system, build milestones into the plan that must be achieved within a specific time frame. A scorecard is one tool used by many organizations that incorporates progress tracking and milestones. See the section ‘Keeping Score of Your Progress’ later in this chapter for info on how to create a scorecard for your company.
Culture
Create an environment that connects employees to the organization’s mission and that makes them feel comfortable. To reinforce the importance of focusing on strategy and vision, reward success. Develop some creative positive and negative consequences for achieving or not achieving the strategy. The rewards may be big or small, as long as they lift the strategy above the day-to-day so people make it a priority.
Determine your plan of attack
Implementing your plan includes several different pieces. Implementing a plan can sometimes feel like it needs another plan of its own. But you don’t need to go to that extent because I’ve done it for you! Use the steps below as your base implementation plan. Modify it to make it your own timeline and fit your organization’s culture and structure. What follows is a set of comprehensive implementation steps:
Finalize your strategic plan after obtaining input from all invested parties.
Align your budget to annual goals based on your financial assessment.
Produce the various versions of your plan for each group.
Establish your scorecard system for tracking and monitoring your plan.
Establish your performance management and reward system.
Roll out your plan to the whole organization
Build all department annual plans around the corporate plan
Set up monthly strategy meetings with established reporting to monitor your progress.
Set up annual strategic review dates, including new assessments and a large group meeting for an annual plan review.
In the light of the importance of strategy implementation as a component of the
strategic management process, the high failure rate of change initiatives due to poor
implementation of new strategies and
wheat
According to existing literature about strategy implementation, it is thus obvious that strategy implementation is a key challenge for today`s organisation. Various scholars found out that most common reasons of firms bankrupting and shut-down in the world are correlated to wrong strategy implementation. The author will, therefore, scrutinize the existing studies of strategy implementation, by analyse the implementation strategy process, and critically examine barriers to strategy implementation as well as possible solutions to overcome the implementation strategy barriers. For the purpose of the class Economic in public policy management, author will evaluate the existing studies of strategy implementation if it is a true reflection of public sector, therefore, examples from public sector prospective may be used to support the literature argument.
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