Posts tagged environmental scan

Incorporating Recurring Measures in Your Assessments

Strategic Planning Think Big March 22, 2014

Strategic planning, as a structured and systematic process, is successful when it is leader-led and overcomes the five reasons 70% of all strategies fail. Learn how to see your plan through to success. The strategic planning process is where leaders of an organization establish the vision of the organization’s future and then develop and implement the actions necessary to achieve that future. This article expands on the strategic planning concepts addressed in Think Big, Take Small Steps and is designed to help you achieve success in your strategic planning process.

What Gets Measured, Gets Done — Over and Over Again.

Several weeks ago, I shared with you a tool that I use for organizational assessments in my Assessing Your Organization Using the Military’s DOTMLPF – FREE Assessment blog. In that blog, I told you that I ask, through interviews, for interviewees to rate particular items from 1 to 5.

The reason I structure and write out these interview templates is so that, in a year, myself, or the company, can go back and ask the same questions, or at least a subset of those questions, the same way year-after-year. Specifically, I want them to ask these 1 to 5 questions again if nothing else. This is a way to compare the organization’s strategic progress over the years. This utilizes your DOTMLPF-FREE Assessment as your guiding light over the strategic journey of the organization.

Additionally, when developing the organizational assessment, look for key things that the company measures today and bring that into the assessment. Do they have a balanced scorecard that they use? What type of human resource measures do they have, like employee engagement (I recommend Gallup), retirement eligibility and employee tenure, and attrition rates? Operational volume of services and sales and overall expense, when combined, provide a simple view of average cost per piece for an organization. Look for the big things you can measure every year or that they already measure.

Tying a company’s strategy to what they measure, or things they should be measuring, helps ensure the success for the strategic plan in the future. All too often, strategies are created by a single executive or small group of executives who come up with a mission, vision, and goals, in a conference room. The reality of these are as good as the wordsmithing that occurs to create them. The purpose of Think Big, Take Small Steps and specifically this whole section on How to Conduct an Organizational Assessment, is to provide the Executable Focus that helps strategies succeed.

Incorporating recurring measures in the organizational assessment at the start provides the organization with a repetitive tool for addressing and measuring strategic progress. The tendency will be to measure everything and that simply isn’t required. The company will have lots of measurements that could absorb your time and attention. Focus only on the few that are important.

For instance, I worked with the Air Force Sergeants Association over the years as a consultant and volunteer. As a membership organization, their primary focus is providing an Air Force Enlisted Voice on Capitol Hill. Their mission is only effective if they have a strong membership base. As a general rule, lobbying associations with less than 100K members tend to be discounted. Thus, Membership Strength was the most important strategic metric for the association, especially when they hover around 120K. However, for a long time, they only focused on Membership Recruiting and didn’t really look at the bottom line. They would be recruiting people by the droves, but on the back end they were pouring out the door faster as their membership expired. Taking account of Membership Strength, along with Membership Recruiting, Membership Retention, and Membership Loss provides the full strategic picture on the most important factor that the association cares about–Legislative Strength. Now you they strategically examine what drives recruiting and retention and causes loss for the organization and focus on these activities. A DOTMLPF-FREE assessment further highlights gaps that might be affecting or preventing the association from being successful.

Part of assessing an organization is to develop recurring measures that give the organization a repetitive tool for addressing and measuring strategic progress. If you follow my suggested approach with DOTMLPF-FREE, you will automatically create a starting strategic performance measure. Then focusing on those important few metrics that tell you everything about the organization and are fairly easy to obtain round out the assessment. Remember, this is strategic…not operational or tactical planning…and you want to focus on strategic measures that lead you to operational and tactical actions. This provides an executable focus to your plan.

So, 70% of all plans fail to some level; however, by following these guidelines you can help ensure your strategic plan will be one of the 30% successes that everyone reads about.

Related Links:

Air Force Sergeants Association: http://afsahq.org/
http://balancedscorecard.org/
http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/how-to-measure-your-strategic-plans-success.html
http://www.gallup.com/

The Importance of a Stakeholder Assessment

Change Management Strategic Planning Think Big February 15, 2014 2 Comments

Conducting a Stakeholder Assessment When Developing a Strategic Plan is Crucial

I see a “strategy” being made up of three things: A mission, a vision, and goals on how to get from where you are now to where you are going. Those goals represent CHANGE in an organization–strategic change.

Anytime there is a change, there will be people who are for it and against it. The rest are the movable middle. Anytime you are planning a change, you need to analyze the audience that will be impacted by that change and continually manage that audience through the change.

Case in point: One of my clients had the words, “Meet customer’s expectations through product delivery,” in one of their goal statements. The strategy had been in place for several months, and the head of their operations was not supportive of the strategy–he wanted to create it himself versus as a leadership team. He also liked living in the realm of strategy because then he really wasn’t accountable for doing anything. Note that ‘accountable’ is a key word here. I was in a meeting with the head of the strategic planning department and the operations director and he said, quote, “I will not hold my people accountable for meeting customer expectations.”

Who, in the right mind as a leader, can say something as ludicrous as that? By this time, the strategy was really rolling out–plans were in place and changes were occurring. All this went on regardless of how much he tried to stop it. This was the cry of a desperate man. As a result of the shadow he cast, one of his directs was responsible for deploying part of the plan–specifically under this goal. We were attempting to establish actions and dates, when he broke down in a whiney voice almost on the edge of tears, and cried, “But, I don’t want to be held accountable to this.”

These situations are real. Strategy–good strategy–means change. If you are not prepared for this type of behavior from people that have influence and you require to make the strategy reality, then you will get stopped by this type of behavior.

I know in Good to Great, you are supposed to get people on the bus and off the bus to make things work, but in the real world, some organizations don’t have that luxury. Then you have to determine how to deal with them.

In a strategic change, there are four potential groups that you have to consider. Obviously, first are the stakeholders–those who have a vested interest in the change and impact of the change. Second are the customers–those who direct your organization to deliver goods and/or services. All customers are stakeholders, but not all stakeholders are customers. Two other potential groups are Partners and Suppliers. Partners and Suppliers are those you work with to deliver your goods and services to the Customer. Sometimes they can be everything, or sometimes, not. Understanding who they are and who of them are key–make a difference and can impact the change–is important. Note this Venn diagram and how these audiences interact.

Once you know who they are, list them out and try to determine what you know about then and what you don’t know about them. List out what stake they have in the change–what will be impacted and how they feel. On a scale of 1-5, rate their level of support of the change and on the same scale rate the level of influence that can have to impact it–1 being lowest. This tells you where you potentially could have your most difficult problems. As you can imagine, the Operations Director in my above example was low in support and high in influence–not a good combination. Those that are high in both can also become your greatest champions. Those who are low in both probably can be ignored–best to spend precious resources on the most important stuff.

With those that are important to this effort, plot them each on this continuum:

If they are low, or not even on the continuum, then, strategic activities designed to raise them on the continuum might help their acceptance and assistance. Sometimes they fully understand what is going on, but, getting them higher is impossible. In the case of the Operations Director, we basically forced him to retire and the next director that was hired supported the strategy. The bus activity; however, this took time. Obviously, if someone is simply aware of the strategy and doesn’t understand why it’s being done and what its impact is, then desiring advocacy and ownership is impossible. So, if you have someone at awareness, but you need them as an advocate, then you need to first get them to understanding, and then next to acceptance. Makes sense, right?

This is also helpful to determine if you already have someone at advocacy and that’s where you want them, then you don’t need to do anything. If someone has little influence on the strategy and change, then maybe awareness or understanding is fine. These decisions again allow you to focus your efforts in strategic areas.

Another way to map your audience is through this tool:

It’s a bit simpler in its approach, but can be effective. For a strategic plan, which takes years to implement, I like a much more detailed assessment and action plan than this, but you can choose. I also am Prosci certified in ADKAR, so I like to use that approach, but I am not free to share their proprietary process on this blog. You can read about it in books from Amazon and their certification is very effective. The approaches I’ve shared here are based on my Master’s-level Change Management certification from Georgetown University and are not proprietary.

So, you can see how important a Stakeholder Assessment is to develop during the Organizational Assessment. This, like any change effort, when done early, helps to prep the space and get people on board quickly or identify those you need to work around. This tool, is a lasting assessment that you may revisit regularly to see how things are progressing.

So, 70% of all plans fail to some level; however, by following these guidelines you can help ensure your strategic plan will be one of the 30% successes that everyone reads about.

2. http://www.amazon.com/Change-Management-The-People-Side/dp/193088561X/ref=tmm_pap_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1392477543&sr=8-2

3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stakeholder_analysis

Assessing Your Organization Using the Military’s DOTMLPF – FREE Assessment

Strategic Planning Think Big February 8, 2014 11 Comments

Understand How to Use this Military Assessment Tool to Assess Your Business

Several years ago I was working with a major Army headquarters in the north central United States. They had been growing over the past several years, merging various related responsibilities into their organization. The problem was that they were more just bolting these new capabilities on, versus really integrating themselves to deliver a seamless capability.

I was called in to help them come up with a multi-year strategic plan. This was mainly because the headquarters over this headquarters was developing a new strategic plan. So there wasn’t a lot of buy in for strategic planning.

They even had a planning department with five people that were responsible for strategic planning. After the kickoff, I sat down with the head of the strategic planning team and he told me they had already developed three strategic plans over the past five years and I would fail at delivering anything useful, but he was here to support the year-long project.

Nice start, huh?

In the first blog of this series Think Big, Take Small Steps, I talk about the three things that you must have in strategic planning or you probably will fail:

Executable Focus
Strategic Framework
Traceable Implementation
Rigor and Accountability
Communication

In that article, I point out that all successful plans have an Executable Focus. If a plan lacks focus on fixing organizational problems and overcoming barriers to the organization’s vision it is not built on the realities of the environment impacting the organization.

Well, this team had built three strategic plans by themselves by coming up with fancy words that started with mission and vision, but were not built off any discernible assessment. As a matter of fact, they were so proud of their last “strategic plan” because they were able to get it to one page.

So, I’ve explained why doing an solid organizational assessment is important to ensure the success of your plan. The reason I highlight this client over many others that were much the same, is because this client is where I developed my DOTMLPF-FREE approach that I still use today.

It was very important to the commanding general of this organization that we use Army and Joint Force strategic planning guidance and approaches. Actually, the plan was actually called a “Campaign Plan” to fit this desire. So, I needed an assessment approach that he and his staff understood and accepted. The term “Environmental Scan” was foreign to them–this is something I’ve run into before with military clients. I decided to use the framework used in Joint Force planning called DOTMLPF. Unfortunately, their literally is nothing significant written about this, aside from what the letter mean.

D — Doctrine
O — Organization
T — Training
M — Material
L — Leadership
P — Personnel
F — Facilities

I was also concerned about things this approach didn’t cover, so I added the acronym “FREE” to the end of this assessment tool:

F — Finances
R – Relationships
E — Efficiency
E — Effectiveness

So, to use this in phonetic terms, say, “Dot Mil P F, Free.”

I won’t talk about it here, but I have since added “Plus I Squared,” to the acronym (DOTMLPF-FREE+i²). This incorporates Innovation and Information.

I outline my interview template following this format. I also ask through the interview for the interviewee to rate a particular item from 1 to 5 and I’ll ask, if it’s not a 5, what would it take to get to 5. I gather all these score and present the results in a Radar chart (see below).

Doctrine
Doctrine covers is current mission, vision and guiding principles of the organization. Here is an example of how in depth I get with the questions associated with the mission part of doctrine:

1. A “mission” captures and expresses the enduring nature of what the organization is about – its purpose and focus. The current mission statement of your organization is, “XXX.”
1.a. What does this mission statement mean to you?
1.b. Do you feel the mission statement articulates the fundamental purpose of your organization? If not, what needs to change?
1.c. Do you feel the mission statement provides enough focus to define your organization’s reason for being, yet allows maneuvering room to execute it? If not, what needs to change?
1.d. Do you feel the mission statement focuses on “what” your organization does or “how” ASC does their mission? If not “what,” what needs to change?
1.e. Do you feel the mission statement clearly reflects customer and stakeholder needs and expectations? If not, what needs to change?
1.f. Where does your role in the organization fit in the mission statement?
1.g. If you would define the mission of your organization differently, how would you define the mission of the organization?

As you can imagine, I get quiet in depth with the categories.

Organization
In organization, I’m looking at structure (looking for stovepipes), accountable governance, and internal communication.

Training
Training covers organizational education, training, and development of all leaders and personnel.

Material
Material or Materiel, covers equipment, suppliers, tools, and information systems and software.

Leadership
I’m looking at capability, emotional intelligence, servant leadership, and engagement.

Personnel
Your employees are your greatest asset. In personnel, I examine the knowledge, skills, and abilities; how they are being used (8th waste in Lean); do they have the right types and amounts; capacity and productivity; and their engagement.

Facilities
Facilities includes things like buildings, space utilization, conference rooms, and furniture. I look at this from a main headquarters and distributed offices perspective…normally HQ is much better than the geographically located offices.

Finances
I ask several different questions. How well is the organization budgeting and forecasting? How close is their planned and actual? What do they do with excess or when they overspend? Do they use any activity based costing or management techniques.

Relationships
Relationships covers how they interact with their customers, stakeholders, partners, and suppliers. I also talk to the key ones in each group and find out what they think about the organization and how the relationship is. It’s always amazing how much different the two are.

Efficiency and Effectiveness
Efficiency and Effectiveness speaks to their use of metrics, process management, improvement activities, total cost of ownership understanding, and operational excellence.

As you can see, by following this guideline, you can really obtain a very well-rounded assessment of any organization. Although this was a military tool that I repurposed, it works for any organization. Today I have added Innovation and Information as two other areas I look at, but I think you get the gist.

So, 70% of all plans fail to some level; however, by following these guidelines you can help ensure your strategic plan will be one of the 30% successes that everyone reads about.

Related Links:

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOTMLPF

2. http://www.dtic.mil/doctrine/new_pubs/jp1_02.pdf

3. http://soldiersystems.net/2012/05/11/dotmlpf-what-is-it/

How to Conduct an Organizational Assessment

Strategic Planning Think Big January 25, 2014 10 Comments

Establishing an Executable Focus to Ensure the Success of Your Strategic Plan.

It really doesn’t matter what you are doing; if you are planning to change something from what it is today to something different tomorrow, then you need to understand the way it is today. The reason this is important in strategic plan development is because a strategy and associated plan should be designed to overcome current barriers to your vision. I like to use the image of building a bridge over troubled water. Today you’re on one side of the bridge and you need to get to the other side.

If you didn’t know how deep, how fast, and what lies below the surface of the water you plan to cross, then you’re bound to fail. So, an organizational analysis is a survey of the river and a testing of the banks to determine the best way to build your bridge.

I have heard many terms over the years, like preplanning analysis, environmental scan, SWOT analysis, etc. There is nothing wrong with these terms, but my plan is to show you how to ensure whatever you call it, it provides you with the data you need. I use the term organizational analysis, because that seems to be the least technical and better understood by my customers.

Some of those terms used above are tools that you might use during an assessment. I plan to cover many of these tools next week in Understanding the Different Assessment Tools. Also, I want to share a very specific tool that I learned about in the military and now apply in all of my assessment activities. I will talk about this tool in two weeks in Assessing Your Organization Using the Military’s DOTMLPF – FREE Assessment. Future articles in this series will cover other tools, like a Stakeholder Assessment, a Change Readiness Assessment, the SWOT Assessment, and Scenario Planning.

Today is simply an overview of the approach I use and when I apply these various assessment tools. I look forward to your ideas on the approach and others you have used.

The closest approach to what I use to assess an organization, that I have seen documented, would be the Delphi Technique. The Delphi Technique is comprehensive, but I add some things to it. Let me outline the activities as I like to see them occur during an assessment. Sometimes, this approach changes, or (in many cases) things happen at the same time. I’ve completed assessments as quickly as a couple of weeks and I’ve had one take four months. This will depend on the size and complexity of the organization. Additionally, if the organization already has somewhat of a grasp of strategic planning and a plan in place that isn’t too bad, it can speed up the process. Don’t simply rely on what they’ve done–there is a good chance they missed things to get it done quickly.

Here are the activities I employ to conduct the assessment:

RESEARCH

First I start with conducting as much research on materials and data the organization uses to communicate, direct, evaluate, and improve the organization. I review everything they put out about their company in print and through the web and social media. I look at current strategies, policies, and directives. I review their organizational structure and understand the purposes of each organization and relative employee and contractor strength. I look at what training programs they employ and attend and the level of knowledge, skills and abilities of employees and leadership. The list goes on…

In two weeks, I will lay out the specific framework that I use to review an organization and formulate the next stage. A key component of this research is to determine who to interview and what to ask. The next step in my assessment is developing interview questions that are influenced by my research.

The most important thing is that you can’t conduct an assessment on research alone. What people put in writing is never exactly how things are really working. You must interview people to verify your findings and get to the entire picture.

Expect your initial research to take up to a week. You will continue your research even after you’ve started your interviews, because you will come across other things to consider and review.

INTERVIEWS

Interviews with key leadership, knowledgeable employees, organizational stakeholders, customers, and strategic partners are key to the success of an organizational assessment. Your interviews should be focused on obtaining a good picture of what the organization is facing. Much of the topics listed in the research section are repeated here. The framework I use to gather data is the same framework that I use to interview. I call it DOTMLPF-FREE.

The number of interviews vary based on organizational size and complexity. I normally can get away with simply 10 to 20 interviews, but my longest project had 44 interviews. The client was adamant about us getting many views from across the organization and outside the organization. Honestly, in three or four interviews, I normally know what’s going on…the remaining interviews simply validate what I know and what’s already been said.

To ensure that you are systematic in your interview approach, make sure you use an interview questionnaire. Don’t ask the questions word-for-word, but use it as a template to drive your interview and make sure you don’t miss anything. It can be helpful to send the questionnaire out before the interviews to help people prepare their thoughts and possibly provide key documents that you might need. However, don’t allow them to fill it out and send it back–you will lose everything in this approach, Trust Me.

Written interview templates help your clients see the breadth and depth of your assessment before you are too deep into it. I normally have them approve the questions and also ask if there is any question(s) they would like added–something they really want to know. Your clients should also approve the interviewee list and can recommend adding names of people you hadn’t thought of.

Be careful with the number of interviews–rule of thumb is it take three hours for every interview–an hour for the interview, an hour to document the interview, and an hour to tie the results into your analysis. So, ten interviews is 30 hours–almost an entire week. When you apply how busy the interviewees might be, getting on their calendars means you can expect a week per ten. If the interviewees require travel to other locations (in other states or countries), then you can expect this timeline to increase. The organization that took me four months, took a month for the research, and three months for interviews due to schedules and traveling. Part of that time, of course, is the next steps of putting it all together.

Having written interview templates helps if you have multiple interviewers working with you on the team. They can follow the template and bring back data. Make sure they know what and how to ask questions–they can’t simply follow the questions, it has to be a guide. But, for large efforts, a team can help. I always try to have someone to take notes, so I can simply ask questions. I do take my own notes and write everything down afterwards, but having a second person helps me focus on the interviewee. Once I used a recording device, but I think this was a distraction for the interviewee and don’t recommend it.

ADDITIONAL ASSESSMENT TOOLS

Based on time and availability of staff, I like to conduct various different analyses of the organization. These take the form of change readiness assessments, stakeholder assessments, culture assessments, process and enterprise maturity assessments. Using these types of tools, if you understand them, can provide a measuring stick for the organization to use over-and-over, year-after-year. This way they serve as a solid stake in the ground for the current state, a progression meter for the future, and in some cases a basis for comparison against other organizations. A great tool used by many organizations is the Gallup Employee Engagement Assessment. This tool measures employee engagement within the organization off a small set of questions. I will discuss several of these tools in future blogs, but the Gallup tool, I’ll leave to your own research.

Once you’ve done your research, I like to organize my assessment presentation in a very specific manner. I normally (taught by Booz | Allen | Hamilton) use a very detailed and in-depth PowerPoint presentation, but the format can work with a written assessment as well. Here are the major areas of the assessment:

1. Purpose.

2. Key Recommendations.

3. Planning Approach showing the entire planning approach being used and where we are at the point of this report.

4. Assessment Inputs:

a. Number of Interviews.

b. Key Documents researched.

c. Assessment tools used.

4. List of all interviewees by type.

5. List of key documents reviewed.

6. Identification of key Stakeholder, Customers, and Partners. I will talk much more about this in a future blog.

7. Organizational structure at a high level and manpower/human capital assessment.

8. Key metrics used by the organization that highlight strategic progress. Thos in the areas of satisfaction, financial, performance, and personnel.

9. Assessment tool results.

10. A high-level Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) analysis — like an executive summary of the big study.

11. Consolidate and prioritize the trends, issues, and problems (TIPs) facing the organization and develop them into single issues. This is the meat of the assessment and what formulates the Key Recommendations in the front of the assessment.

Once I’ve completed my assessment, I will sit down with the primary Client so that he or she can review it before anyone else in his organization sees it. This way, they get the unfiltered view of what is going on, but can adjust the product so as not to embarrass or throw anyone in the organization “under the bus.”

At this point the assessment is completely truthful and if the client is part of the problem I will say it. I honestly do not pull punches, I just deliver with tact. Never tell someone they are the problem without justification and examples and always be prepared with recommendations on what they could and should do about it.

Also, I don’t highlight anyone’s specific opinions from the interviews. This protects them for telling the truth and protects your reputation. I caveat my analysis based on research and interviews. What I saw, might not be the full truth, since sometimes you only see a slice of what really is happening.

The strategic plan should be a transformational document for the organization. It will clearly outlines the mission and purpose of the organization and where they are going in the next 3-5 years, which is codified in the vision. A good strategic plan should lays out a systematic plan to close the “gap” between where they are now and where they are going. This “gap” is identified by the organizational assessment results. A good and throughout assessment will help define a very strong strategic plan.

So, 70% of all plans fail to some level; however, by following these guidelines you can help ensure your strategic plan will be one of the 30% successes that everyone reads about.

Related Information:

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delphi_method.

2. http://www.gallup.com/.

3. 12: The Elements of Great Managing, by Rodd Wagner and James K. Harter