Turning strategy into action Te whakatinana i te rautaki

Your strategic objective should be a single goal. Make it specific and measurable, and set a target date for when you will achieve it. Your objective should flow from the plans you developed by looking at the market, your business or both. 

Your scope is the boundaries your business will not go beyond to achieve your objective.

Think about your scope in three areas: 

• customer or offering
• geographic location
• vertical integration (buying parts of the production or sales process that you previously outsourced). 

The ‘finding value’ part of the strategy planning worksheet can help you set your scope by finding:

• the unique activities that make you money – focus on these
• the activities that aren’t unique or don’t make you money – focus less on these, cutting them back if you can
• other opportunities to add more value without too much extra cost, or to cut costs without hurting your value.

Your advantage explains the things that make your business unique and how and why those things will help you succeed. You might plan to build on an existing advantage, or to redefine your point of difference.

Your strategy planning worksheet should have helped you identify your advantage by looking at your business, your customers, and your market. For example, your advantage could be creating new value by adding product or service elements to what you offer today.

A scorecard for strategy only works if you have a clear picture of what you’re trying to achieve. Make sure you’ve created a strategy statement that you can base your scorecard on.

Break your strategic objective into categories.

These are some popular ones:

• finances – What financial goals will my strategy help achieve?
• customers and stakeholders – How well should I be performing to meet their expectations?
• internal processes – What objectives for systems and processes do I need to meet customer expectations?
• innovation and learning – What new products or processes do I need to meet my overall objective?

Plan what you’ll do for each category. Everything you do should improve your performance in that category and contribute towards your overall strategic objective.

Make sure your categories contribute towards achieving your objective. Your detailed objectives in each category need to be consistent with each other, and with the objectives in other categories.

The smaller the business, the more areas you generally want to improve. But connecting each detailed objective to your overall strategy helps you focus on the right measures and targets. 

For example, you might define ‘increased sales over last year’ as one measure for growing your profits and choose ‘20% by value’ as your target.

When you’re working towards your strategic objective, your measures will help you track your progress. 

Are they consistent with your business’s structure, strategy, and systems? If they aren’t consistent, consider what needs to change.

Make your staff feel an emotional connection to it, rather than just feeling obliged to take part.

How well does each one support the others? Identify where you need to make changes.

Work with your staff rather than commanding them, helping them feel part of the process.

Do they support the strategy, structure, and systems you want? Do they support each another? If not, consider what needs to change.

You may need to adjust things in a few stages. Even if it’s time consuming, it will result in better performance.

Demonstrate how new approaches have improved performance and ensure that key people in your team support the change and set a good example.