Sustaining and managing your strategy

A PESTEL analysis and industry assessment are crucial components of any business strategy for understanding of the external factors that can impact a business. You can conduct an assessment, for Political, Economic, Social, Technology, Environmental and Legal influences by Arena (industry and geography) - see the Discover opportunities and threats section. Use your PESTEL assessment to identify potential opportunities and threats, and develop strategies to capitalize on emerging trends, and mitigate risks.

An industry assessment is valuable to identify the factors influencing industry competitive forces and profitabilty. It is an important determinant of decisions to enter, exit or how to compete in different industry arenas. You can conduct an assessment, for each of the Five forces by Arena (industry and geography) See the Assess Industry profitability section of that page.

You can use the Five forces assessment tool to identify potential industry based opportunities and threats, and develop strategies to capitalize on emerging trends, and mitigate risks.

You can identify opportunities and threats by evaluating your value proposition, value blend or capabilities and resources relative to your competitors.

This assessment is done within a strategy implementation to identify where the strategy needs to focus to succeed relative to the competition. This may influence goals within the customer value or process or capability enablement section your balanced scorecard. See the scorecards section of the StrategyCAD guide, for more information about working with scorecards and assessment. See the Assessment section for more information about competitive, product and related assessments.

You can configure scorecards to assess different criteria and maintain assessments across multiple dimensions including time to track performance.

You can identify opportunities and threats by evaluating the consumption chains of your business and/or products.

A consumption is the series of steps a customer needs to go through to become aware of, identify the desire for, purchase, acquire, setup, use, acquire support, and eventually dispose of your product or service.

A consumption chain assessment allows you to assess how easy or difficult your consumption chain is at different points and the identify opportunities to be easier to find, or do business with. This assessment is done within Customer assessment section of a strategy implementation to identify where the strategy needs to focus to succeed relative to competition which will influence goals within your balanced scorecard. See the scorecards section of the StrategyCAD guide, for more information about working with scorecards and assessment. See the Assessment section for more information about competitive, product and related assessments.

You can configure scorecards to assess different criteria and maintain assessments across multiple dimensions including time to track performance.

McKinsey & Company, a management consulting firm, created the 7-S model to help client companies successfully implement their strategies. It was later featured in the book In Search of Excellence, by former McKinsey consultants Thomas J. Peters and Robert H. Waterman. The model highlights 7 important elements of organizational design to create the alignment necessary to implement the business strategy. The 7 S’s are: Strategy, Structure, Systems, Skills, Staffing, Style and Shared Values.

The Star model, like the McKinsey 7s Model helps you and your team successfully implement your strategies. The model highlights 5 important elements of organizational design to create the alignment necessary to implement the business strategy. The 5 elements are: Strategy, Structure, Processes, Rewards and People.

You can quantitatively assess your ecosystem (suppliers / partners) capabilities and resources using the ecosystem assessment / scorecards for one or more of supply chain, partnerships or free form (an assessment of your design).

Your diagnosis is part of what might be called root cause analysis, or the top of the 5 whys. Your diagnosis aims to create leverage in your strategy implementation; that is, by addressing the big rock opportunity or the big anchor constraint then the business performance improves most substantially. Competitors can play at doing 10, 20 or 100 different little or medium things, but the diagnosis creates the opportunity to address the root issue.

Example in the 1990's Lou Gestner took over a very troubled IBM. The technology industry was fragmenting and many experts indicated the IBM needed to be broken up to align with the overall industry fragmentation. Gestner, however made a different diagnosis. His diagnosis was that IBM needed to become more integrated to be prepared to provide customers with integrated solutions rather than fragmented pieces of technology. That diagnosis set a completely different policy and action plan than one of IBM needs to fragment.

Your guiding policy is part of your strategy kernel the heart of good strategy. Your guiding policy in StrategyCAD can include

1. Your organizational chart to describe organizational / team structure reporting and supporting lines.

2. Preconfigured and customized policies

1. Do more, sustain, do less and eliminate policy matrix

   All policies are essentially of this structure. What does the business need to do more of and sustain to deal with the situation in the diagnosis and what does it need to do less or eliminate doing to make the capacity and deal with the situation in the diagnosis

2. Ansoff Growth Matrix

   Ansoff Growth Matrix is an enduring Matrix for providing a policy for how a business is going to achieve growth and recognizes the level of risk in the growth policy

Additionally, you can create and configure your own policy structure.

3. Roadmaps - that define the sequence of outcomes and the role of the internal alignment topics e.g. systems, people, skills, shared values or any other attributes you wish to add.

The balanced scorecard is a strategic management framework that helps translate strategic objectives into specific performance measures and targets. The framework provides a balanced view of performance across four perspectives: financial, customer, internal processes, and learning and growth (capability).

1. As you add objectives to your implementation action plan you can add them to a layer of your balanced scorecard to verify the feasibility of your action plan.

You can answer the question and demonstrate to your team(s) and stakeholders that based on the actions in the scorecard your business can achieve the desired business outcomes, by achieving uour customer outcomes and those customer outcomes can be achieved with the process and people objectives that have been set.

Every objective in StrategyCAD is specifically structure to support the SMART Goal / objective format.

SMART goals ensure the clarity created in the strategy ripples into the goals / objectives of implementation.