Barriers to Strategy Development: Admitting You Need Help and Issue Prioritization
Continuing my summation of comments related to the post “IN SEARCH OF: Business Processes Supporting Strategy Execution and Innovation“, I reveal my discussion with Cullen Coates. Once again, I encourage you to read all the comments at the post- they reveal a desire by all parties to learn and understand each other.
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Mr. Coates: Basically I find that people like to be involved in “strategy stuff” - it’s fun like marketing. I also find that when people get together to “do” strategy they generally come to the table each with their own agenda - they know what the strategy should be and secretly want to convince others that their ideas are the best (for example I rarely meet CEO’s who admit that they really need help with strategy or that they don’t have strategy in place). So, I find that the starting place for good strategy development is with processes I use to identify key issues across the organization and then force prioritization - this tends to bring people together as they can begin to see how their colleagues view the organization. It also lays the foundation for whatever “ideas” are later selected as the prioritized goals - prioritized goals must align with prioritized issues in general - at a minimum.
PM411: The prioritizing-of-issues process sounds very good- mirrors a process at the PMO/governance board level in relation to projects- project portfolio management prioritization. You talk a little about execs learning about each others issues/processes/challenges- the Goldratt Viable Vision process has an executive workshop that was called a “4X4″: 4 days of executives doing nothing but presenting/discussing their respective operations to each other. This way you get a more level field to play on; the next 4 days are spent putting together a strategy tree and prioritizing strategies, tactics, and projects. There are obviously a lot more details in the process- one of them being applying the Theory of Constraints to the process (again, Eli Goldratt).
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What is your strategy development process? Is your CEO unable to admit he or she needs help with it? Is it necessary to first “level the field” by learning about each executive’s organizational issues and challenges?
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Tags: business-processes, CEO, management, projectmanagement411, projects, standardized processes, strategy developmentRelated Stories
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