Ask yourself this simple question about your company, do you believe top management could sum up the company’s strategy in a sentence or two? And more importantly, even if they could, would the employees at all levels explain it the same way? Research shows us very clearly that very few management teams can honestly answer these simple questions in the affirmative. Not being able to sum up the strategy and not having all employees understand it has dire consequences when attempting Agile, DevOps or Digital. (Take a look at many of the so called DevOps unicorns)
You may be asking why being able to summarize the strategy and having all employees be able express the company’s strategy succinctly is important. Well, research shows us that the companies where management can easily sum up their strategy are often the most successful in their industry. Research has also shown us that these companies have dramatically increased their market share, consistently outperform their rivals in terms of ROI and are often listed among the list of the top companies to work for.
The question you may be asking is, what exactly does this have to do with Agile, DevOps and Digital? Well, when we look at companies that can’t easily express a clear and simple strategy statement, they most likely fall into one of two categories, those that have failed to execute their strategy or they never even had one in the first place. When a company does not have a clear and succinct strategy what we see Is employees at all levels from executives management to the lowest level employees expressing clear frustration because they either don’t see that a clear strategy exists for the company or they don’t understand why the employees below them don’t understand what the strategy is. This kind of frustration manifests itself on Agile, DevOps and Digital in some of the following examples:
• We have been trying for months to get the Agile initiative off the ground, when we ask for resources and budget the business says they can’t provide any. Why does the business see Agile as an IT initiative only?
• In order to get the automated delivery pipeline fully functional we must tackle some technical debt, which will have costs and some short term disruptions to the delivery process. We have explained the reasons why we must tackle the debt and what the disruptions will be, but we keep getting mixed signals of support from the executive team and the business.
• We have been trying to implement Agile, DevOps and Digital for two years as part of our strategy and to remain competitive in our markets, but we have had limited success due to departments, management and employees not buying in.
When you talk with the executive leaders of most companies they are actually perplexed as to why the extensively crafted strategy they created never gets implemented. They fail to understand why the initiatives they have rigorously described in the massive volumes of documentation that have come out of their annual budgeting process and strategic-planning process should in their minds ensure competitive success. What they have unfortunately failed to understand is the absolute need to provide a simple, clear, succinct strategy statement that everyone can internalize and use as a guide for making difficult choices. These difficult choices are what trips up Agile, DevOps and Digital, since the company doesn’t know what the strategy is, they thus don’t fully understand the role Agile, DevOps and Digital are supposed to play in ensuring the strategy is accomplished. If departments, management and employees could clearly envision the strategy and how Agile, DevOps and Digital were necessary to accomplish the strategy, they would be more likely to make the correct choices and provide the support needed.
What we see unfortunately in most companies is smart, hard working people trying their best to establish Agile, DevOps or Digital, because they believe and understand that it’s the right direction for their company, but the end result is just confusion, frustration and costly missteps. If their company instead had a well written and clear statement of strategy, they would find that behaviors would align within the business, which in turn would allow employees, departments and management in the company to make choices that reinforce Agile, DevOps and Digital. The overall effect would be to render their employees exponentially more effective.
You are at this point probably asking why don’t executives write a clear and easy to internalize strategy statement? Here’s why. Most executives don’t fully understand what all the elements of a strategy statement are, this makes it next to impossible for them to develop one. If they could write a clear definition, two things would happen. The first is that the formulation would become much easier because the executives would know what they are trying to create. Secondly, the implementation now becomes simpler since they can more easily communicate the strategy’s essence and employees in the organization can internalized the strategy statement.
In our next blog we will explain how to write a strategy statement.