Discover in 10 steps how to implement your business strategy with the knowledge that you ALREADY have.
"… seeing what is before our eyes requires constant effort…" I do not say it, said George Owell (1903-1950) British writer and journalist.
And it is that I fully share this statement since many times we are in front of our businesses and we are not able to see many obvious things until someone else comes, comments on them and opens your eyes.
In this article I am going to talk about precisely that. I am going to show you how you have all the tools and knowledge to successfully develop your business strategy and achieve the results you expect.
You just need work and a little order.
I would love that after reading this article you wrote in the comments to tell me that you have realized that carrying out a business strategy is not so difficult, what happens is that many times we skip a series of steps when executing it and that makes What we are doing does not work.
So I am going to tell you Step by Step everything I have learned doing iso 9001 consulting in relation to planning and achieving business objectives to develop a business strategy.
Here I leave you an outline of all the steps so you can take a look at what you are going to read below:
Step 1: Define what you want to achieve
This step seems very obvious but it is essential to define well what we want to achieve. Behind any business strategy there is an objective to be achieved, something that is intended to be achieved.
Therefore, what makes up any business strategy is the sum of one or more objectives to be achieved.
You will agree with me that if the sum of one or several objectives make up the strategy, where to start is by a clear definition of that objective so that it really is a quality objective:
When I tell you to clearly define an objective it is to define it so that it can be:
- understand (describe it in a specific and unambiguous way) quantify (describe it in such a way that it can be counted and measured) limited in time (set an end date to reach the objective) achieve (it must be a realistic objective, it can be ambitious but it must be achievable)
Surely you have read the SMART objectives on countless occasions… I don't want to go into that subject now because there are so many articles on the internet about it.
What I do want you to see are well and poorly stated objectives:
| Poorly stated objective | Well stated objective |
|---|---|
| increase customer satisfaction | Increase customer satisfaction by 5% at the end of 2020 compared to 2019 as measured through satisfaction surveys. |
| increase our market share by 7%. | Increase our market share by the end of 2020 by 7% compared to 2019. |
| achieve 100% productivity in our workshop by the end of 2020 (this is not realistic) | Achieve 80% productivity in our workshop by the end of 2020. |
You see the difference? Easy and logical, right?
If we do not make this effort to define the objective well, do you think that the rest of the steps will be done well to correctly execute the strategy?
Step 2: With what product, service or process are you going to reach your goal
Everything we have planned to achieve in our strategy will be achieved thanks to a product, service or a process within your organization.
To explain this, I am going to use the previous examples.
- If you want to increase customer satisfaction by 5%, you will want to achieve it:
- Improving the customer service process? Improving the post sale service process? Increasing the quality of the product (specifications and functionalities) you deliver? Increasing the quality of the service (know-how and user experience) what do you deliver
- With a specific product or with several? With a specific service or with several? With a new product or with an existing product in your organization? With a new service or with an existing service in your organization?
What does it change if you choose one or the other option? Define it well in your business strategy.
Step 3: What tasks / work needs to be done
You already have clearly defined what you want to achieve, delimited with what product, service or process you are going to get it and the date you want to get it.
Now you are ready to start making a list of tasks that will lead you to achieve what you have previously defined.
This list describes all the activities / tasks that you and your team will have to carry out to achieve the objective set by your proposed deadline. You can describe all one after the other, don't worry, in the next step you will separate them for each person who must develop them.
The important thing in this step is that the tasks you describe are aligned with your objective to achieve, that is, the task you will carry out will contribute to achieving the objective.
If you want to increase customer satisfaction, a task aligned with your goal could be “take a customer service training / training course”. On the contrary, a not so good task could be "taking an accounting course".
It seems obvious right? But beware of this.
To make a list of tasks you can use predesigned templates that Microsoft Excel offers you for free. It is a quick way to have a design ready in a matter of a click.
To obtain it, simply open the Microsoft Excel application and before clicking again, look at the templates that have predesigned. Click on the one that is marked “List of Pending Tasks for projects”.
Open it up and customize it a bit. Rename the columns as:
- Name Task Unique (U) or Periodic (P) Person who will perform it Cost
For this step, just focus on listing all the tasks and defining if it is a Unique task (U), that is, it will only be performed once or a Periodic task (P) if it is a task that must be repeated periodically.
Step 4: Who will perform the tasks inside and outside the team
This is the step when you start linking tasks and names of the people on your team.
The most important thing in this step is that you take into account the type of task to be carried out and the profile of the person who works with you (knowledge, skills, experience and also the workload that each person has).
Choose the most appropriate people to carry out each task.
Keep in mind that to execute a business strategy not all the resources you will use will be your internal human resources, that is, your staff. You may need to go to the market to outsource some tasks / activities in which your team is not a specialist.
You may have to improve your website to improve the user experience when shopping on the web and you should use an external professional for it.
Or maybe you should hire a customer service training or process optimization course, etc.
Therefore, assign each task to each person and specify with the name of the person if it is an internal resource of your organization or external.
Take it to your Excel and start assigning the task to a person from your team or external professional and write it in the column "Person who will perform it."
Step 5: Training needs / internal and / or external training?
If the person you have selected to perform a task cannot execute it due to workload or some other reason but has the necessary knowledge to do so, they can impart that training to another member of the team to carry out the task / activity that has been proposed.
But sometimes, despite trying to find the best profile within your organization to carry out a strategy task, you will not always find the ideal person. In this case you may have to resort to hiring a training for that person or that group of people as I described in the previous step.
Request quotes / budgets to analyze in the next step what is the cost of it.
Step 6: How much money will it cost?
You will agree with me that all work that you, your employees or an external professional do has a cost.
Performing all these tasks to carry out your strategy is clear that it also has a cost, but how much? That is what I am going to help you analyze.
When we are developing our business strategy developing a series of tasks, there are two types of costs in my view:
- Internal costs: the cost / hour of each employee and your own as manager / director. External costs: the cost / hour of the work performed by external personnel.
This moment is a delicate moment that you have to calmly analyze to know if the strategy that you are deploying and then being executed is viable or not in your organization. This is a reality like a temple…
We can do a thousand things to achieve our business goals, but it is very likely that many of them are not viable.
Any businessman would like to appear in television commercials at the most popular moments in which his product / service is promoted, but we all know that this cost could not be afforded by 95% of companies in a country.
So what you have to do is do a little analysis about what it will cost you to carry out your business strategy.
As in step 3 you already defined the tasks to be carried out and in step 4 who is going to execute them, you have it easier to do this calculation.
Take it to your Excel and calculate the hours that the person will take to carry out this task and multiply it by the cost of its price / hour.
If it is an external professional who performs the task, you have it easier since they will have offered you a quote / quote about how much their work costs.
Once you have all the costs assigned, add them up and you will have the cost of carrying out your strategy in the period you have planned to have your deadline to reach the objective.
A part of all these costs, as you may be imagining, are represented by the internal costs that are generated by your own workers for the hours they are performing these tasks.
These internal costs do not mean an extra outflow of money from your treasury since it is included in the salary you pay them (unless they must do overtime) but what it will mean is a decrease in their production. If they are developing the tasks that make up the business strategy, they will not be carrying out their usual tasks, therefore their production will be reduced.
But how much depletion? you're still wondering. To calculate it you can add one more column to your Excel and call this column “Hours not produced”. You calculate it quickly since in the previous column you have multiplied (hours * cost of each person).
With all this information you can ask yourself these questions:
- Can I assume these external costs to carry out the strategy? Can I assume these internal costs translated into non-productive hours globally? Can I assume these internal costs translated into non-productive hours for each employee?
If all the answers are yes, congratulations go to the next step.
If any of these responses were negative, then you have to go back to step 3 or 4 to remove or replace tasks or reassign tasks to other people.
But do not be scared because this seems very complicated and tiresome to go back, you get it very quickly with Excel. It simply eliminates or replaces tasks and reassigns the people responsible for carrying them out and recalculates the cost.
Without having to leave Excel you do it all.
Step 7: Prioritize tasks:
You already have all the tasks listed, you have the cost and you know that it is viable for your organization.
Now it's your turn to prioritize. What tasks are done first? Here I would ask myself three questions:
- Are there tasks that depend on the achievement of others first to be carried out? Are there tasks that once their profitability ratio (profit / investment) is executed are greater than others? Are there tasks that have a greater impact than others to achieve the proposed objective ?
With these answers you already have the way to prioritize tasks.
You can place that order in your Excel simply by copying and pasting.
Step 8: Carry out the tasks:
This step is important because you have a list of tasks and you are going to start executing them, but what day of the week / month? What time of day?
To do this in an orderly way and transmit it to your team, you must schedule these tasks and set the day and time of the week / month in which they will be executed.
Perhaps there is a day and time of the week in which the production of your company is lower. Take advantage and put these tasks there if you can.
You can meet with each person to plan and schedule the day and time of the week in which the tasks will be carried out.
To do this I use Google Calendar.
You can use a color fan to identify if they are unique or recurring tasks.
If you or your employees do not use this application, I would start doing it because it is very intuitive and easy to use. So you avoid carrying paper agendas and you can always have it even see it through your mobile.
Step 9: Tracking tasks and measuring the result.
Tracking the progress and execution of tasks is something you can never forget. It represents the most important part of controlling the strategy to see if you are doing well or not.
If you did not control to get feedback on the progress, I am sure that you will see yourself at the end of the period that you have stipulated to reach the objective with a lot of tasks not done, with problems or undetected errors, with tasks assigned badly… In short, with your goal without achieving.
By regularly monitoring the strategy and the tasks assigned for it, you avoid these surprises in the end and you have time to channel errors, problems, possible reorganizations of tasks, etc.
Obviously, record this monitoring in your Excel. For this, it includes the last column with the name “Follow-up notes”.
In that column write the notes you think are necessary when you are following up on the tasks with the person responsible for executing them.
Ask him how he is doing with each task, if he has had a problem and if he has completed it in the time you have planned.
The level of achievement of the task can be written in the same column B, inside the cell. By setting the run percentage level, Excel will automatically fill in your green bar chart. Thus, with a glance you can visualize how the execution of all the tasks is.
Never overwrite your Excel file and save changes because you will have lost information between what happened in one measurement period and another period.
Instead, put a date (day - month - year) every time you follow up. This is achieved by double-clicking on the name of the sheet as you can see in this screenshot.
For the next measurement, copy and paste this sheet and put another date on it. That way you will never lose information between one period and another period.
To do this, right-click on the sheet name, click "Move or copy" and then check the "create a copy" box.
Step 10: make decisions about the result achieved
Since in the previous step you have met with the people who are executing the tasks, take advantage of their answers to know if you have made a mistake or not when assigning that task to that person and the estimated time.
If you have to rearrange a task or make new assignments, it's time to do it and modify your Excel.
Well, these are the 10 steps I wanted to expose you to see that you have all the knowledge at your fingertips to carry out your business strategy with guarantees that it will work.
If this post is successful I will write another post to teach you how to draw a balanced scorecard and be able to follow this strategy visually.
Bibliography
- Wikipedia:
