Strategic Deployment

This visual and interactive planning process assigns key performance measures and specific responsibilities for achieving goals to individuals at all levels of the organization. This creates a powerful means for connecting all initiatives with an organization’s mission and strategy to its operations. The end result is a dynamic strategic planning process intrinsically linked to the activities and improvement efforts throughout organization. It is about action not words.

While the journey can take hard work and perseverance, the power of harnessing the hearts and minds of employees to achieve excellence can be transformative. Successful organizations find that freeing employees to spend more time on value-added mission-critical work dramatically improves performance outcomes, customer and stakeholder satisfaction and employee morale. The efforts lead to satisfied constituents, empowered and engaged employees, passionate leaders and a more positive working culture.

Strategic deployment is an evidence-based approach that has been demonstrated globally to produce customer-centric (member-centric) enterprises with superior service delivery outcomes. There are a few key differentiators worth mentioning about strategic deployment that differentiate it from traditional management systems.

Traditional top-down, command and control or management by objectives systems that have been prevalent fail to bring the level of awareness of organizational strategies and goals that inspire any effort to achieve these goals. Often organization missions, purposes and mandates are unclear or unknown leading to ambiguity and poor outcomes not to mention low morale. The question must be asked, “Can a few executives dictate the plans for an entire organization or really understand the problems of the frontline?” There is a gap between strategy and actions. Strategic deployment aims to close that gap.

The key benefits of strategic deployment are that it:

• Focuses on converting strategy to actions;
• Motivates and aligns all employees through a cascading process;
• Focuses on breakthrough strategies (must do can’t fail) without losing sight of the day-to-day business (two-pronged approach);
• Considers the enterprise, removing silos and enabling cross-functional consensus building (fundamentals versus functional);
• Aligns resources (human and capital) to strategic objectives not the other way around;
• Establishes clear accountability throughout the organization;
• Ensures performance monitoring and reporting in an efficient manner;
• Fosters superior organizational learning and corporate performance through built in review and adjustment processes (separate processes not required);
• It achieves this by developing a culture of continuous improvement through engagement and problem solving.

Strategic deployment is a systematic planning methodology for defining the one to three breakthrough strategies of the organization and ensuring the implementation of ‘business fundamentals’ required to successfully run the business on a daily basis get executed. The seven-step approach to achieving this is as follows:

The process is simple and quite similar to traditional strategic planning with important differences. Strategic deployment focuses heavily on a consensus oriented attitude to planning and deployment through a cascading approach of sharing strategies and objectives down to the next level of the organization for input and then back up for consensus. This also happens across the organization to ensure cross functionality is achieved and that the focus remains on business fundamentals versus functions.

At Perspect we have worked with many organizations in the public, private and not for profit sectors in traditional strategic planning and strategic deployment methodologies. We have found that strategic deployment delivers the actionable outcomes our clients are seeking, not reports that gather dust on shelves. If you are interested in learning more about how we can support your organization, please contact us.