Coordinated Participation – the key to Strategy Implementation - By: Dr Neil Miller

Participation in strategy implementation is generally low and ad hoc. This makes achieving a strategy goal uncertain at best. It is hard to understand why managers accept very high risks in strategy implementation that they would never accept in other areas.
This is a surprise when you consider the importance of most strategies to an organization, and peoples’ usually strong motivation to do a good job. Most people would do what they need to do when it needs to be done, if they only knew what to do, when and with whom.
So the solution sounds simple. Give all participants a list of what they need to do, when and with whom, to contribute to the strategy. Some stakeholders will not have a direct contribution, so their participation only involves supporting the people who do.
It is just as important for someone to know that they don’t need to do anything, because this affects how they feel about, and react to, the strategy. It is extremely hard to decide how you feel about a strategy until you know how it affects you. It is also almost impossible for participants to effectively contribute without knowing the details of what they need to do.
However, most managers know that planning the detailed actions for everyone involved in a strategy’s implementation is impossible. But it is relatively easy for a small team to develop a focused action plan. Therefore it is best to get the people, who need to implement the plan, to develop an action plan to achieve the goal you set.
In effect, a big strategy plan is simply a lot of coordinated small action plans. Using software, it is easy to create personal To Do lists from many small plans. To Do lists ensure that stakeholders can explicitly know what they need to do, when and with whom. When small plans are updated to incorporate workflow changes, To Do lists are instantly updated to coordinate participation. Plus feedback notifications keep people informed of changes that affect them.
Management needs to provide the strategic framework, but participants need to drive what is actually done. In this way participants can do what they need to do while the software keeps other people’s work coordinated with them. This helps to keep everyone’s work flowing with minimum interruptions.
TASKey has developed and validated a strategy implementation solution that uses distributed management, and is supported by smart software. The web and mobile software makes implementing a strategy easier, faster, cheaper and less stressful. A simple one page planning template makes it easy to develop a small plan in minutes. The one page plan template is being used by thousands of people in over 175 countries, so we know it works.
Applying the strategy implementation solution ensures that timely, coordinated participation by all stakeholders can be achieved. Implementing a strategy is easier, faster, cheaper and less stressful. But most importantly, the risk to managers not achieving a strategy goal is significantly reduced.
More information is available at http://www.taskey.com/ .

About the Author

TASKey provides project and other management methods and online project and management software to get projects and tasks done fast. By synchronizing plans, to do’s lists, progress charts and feedback; all stakeholders can easily work together to make any project a success. TASKey provides the most affordable, most flexible and most powerful online project and management software availab

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