In my vorige blog (http://wp.me/pPx0P-w) het ek geskryf oor verskillende strategië wat gevolg kan word in jou besigheid. Ek hoop jy het al besluit watter een vir jou sal werk en begin met die beplanning om dit te implementeer. ‘n Paar jaar gelede het ek ‘n artikel geskryf vir Management Today waar ek beskryf hoe jy jou strategie neem en dit afbreek tot op proses vlak vir implementeering. Ek het besluit om dit hier te plaas en hoop dit sal jou ook help.
It is often uttered that the organisation’s strategy should determine the organisation’s business processes and that the business processes in turn are there to realise the strategy. But how does one go about doing this? How do you get from strategy to process and back?
A Balanced Strategy
In theory the opening statement makes good business sense, but sometimes we get lost in the little steps to take us from A to B. Our point of departure should therefore be to define our strategy. By using a Strategy Map (a concept using the Balanced Scorecard to “map out” the organisation’s strategy) the organisation can map its strategy onto four “layers” of strategy being Financial, Customer, Internal Process and Learning and Growth.
The financial perspective provides a view of how the shareholders perceive the organisation (i.e. the organisation’s bottom-line), the customer perspective provides a view of how the customers perceive the organisation (how the organisation provides value to the customer), the internal business process perspective provides a view of what the organisation must excel at to be competitive (the translation of customer-based value adding measures into measures reflecting the organisation’s internal operations), the innovation and learning perspective sets measures that help the organisation compete in a changing business environment (how the organisation continue to improve and create value).
And Then There Was Process
So where do the business processes come in? you may ask. The business processes will fit into the Internal Process layer, but not just yet. First we need to define the Value Chain of the organisation. The Value Chain will provide a holistic view of the organisation, highlighting core and supporting processes on which to build the lower level business processes. The Value Chain thereby helps define the organisations core competencies and the areas where it could achieve competitive advantage.
The various business processes will have specific measurements, Key Performance Areas and Key Performance Indicators that are used to assess performance and control processes. These must be used to move from the strategic objectives and measurements into process level measurements that can be used within an improvement project.
Linking It All Together
Figure 1 provides an illustration of how the strategy is translated into an executable improvement initiative at the business process level using a strategy map. The improvement initiative (Six Sigma, Lean, TOC, TQM, etc) will use the measures, objectives and targets from the strategic level and translate that into the business process level to identify the area for improvement.
Figure 1: Linking Strategy to Process
It is important to ensure that by improving the business process (and related process measurements) the strategic targets will be met and are not standing in isolation. Any such improvement initiative then becomes directly aligned to the organisation’s strategy and benefit can be traced from process level to value chain level to strategic level. It is important to note that the strategy measurements and business process level measurements should always be complementary to each other. The one should never be developed without cognisance of the other.
In Closing
There might be various schools that are either in support of or against some of the approaches used in this paper, but the fact remains that organisations need a clear and comprehensive method of taking strategy and transforming it into executable initiatives. The method described in this paper is one way of moving from strategy to process, explaining the steps in between, and ultimately providing a method to realise organisational strategy.
Volg my gerus op Twitter by @Willie_Krause of op facebook by http://www.facebook.com/?ref=home#!/group.php?gid=333238451957
Groete
Willie
