Our operations services
Operational planning
Operating model design
Organisational restructure
Culture and values reviews
Introduction
So, you’ve been through a strategic planning process and emerged with a shiny new strategy. Now what? Well, in many ways, the hard yards are ahead. That includes developing operational plans, checking your organisational structure and operating model are fit-for-this-particular-strategy, ensuring you have the data and reports to track progress, and adapting your culture as required. Of course, there’s also the biggest item of all, doing the doing.
Answering your key operations and strategy implementation questions
There’s so much to talk about when it comes to operations and strategy implementation. Given these topics are so huge, it’s easy for not-for-profit and other leaders to spend all their time focussed here. That’s why we’ve written this article to draw attention to the big picture of operations and strategy implementation, with a bent towards the more strategic side of the day-to-day.
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There are three main ways that people define operations. The first is that operations are all the things your organisation does. For not-for-profit and for-profit businesses alike, operations are therefore your day-to-day activities that come together to create value. The second definition is that operations relate to the activities and functions focussed on increasing efficiency and effectiveness. The third definition is that operations relate to the inner workings of your organisation, such as human resources, finance and IT.
Fortunately, defining strategy implementation is a bit simpler! Strategy implementation (also referred to as strategy execution) is about translating your strategic plan from words and concepts into action and outcomes. Strategy implementation generally requires business as usual activities in addition to new activities and project work.
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At Ensemble Strategy, we don’t view the strategy implementation lifecycle as purely linear. Strategy implementation is a dynamic experience rather than something that obediently complies with a step-by-step guide. With that in mind, it might help to visualise the three strategic implementation lifecycle “steps” below as a Venn diagram or circle.
1. Set yourself up for success
Once you have a new strategy in place, it needs to be embedded into and cascaded through your organisation. If this doesn’t happen, the strategic plan risks becoming a document that gets shelved and left to gather dust.
This phase of the strategy implementation lifecycle requires internal and external stakeholder communication, creating an operational plan, and updating your reporting frameworks and governance processes. It might also be necessary to review your operating model, organisational structure and culture if you have a transformational strategy or feel these are no longer fit-for-purpose. All of these tasks are about aligning your organisation’s people, configuration and activities to your new strategy.
Set-up doesn’t mean set and forget. As your organisation and the external environment changes over time, it’s important to revisit this phase of the strategy implementation lifecycle. This is about repeatedly ensuring the foundations are in place for the other steps of the strategy implementation lifecycle to happen effectively.
2. Action the plan
This is the bulk of the work but requires the least words to summarise. This is where the rubber hits the road, and your strategic plan and operational plan are enacted. Ongoing communications within and across teams are critical here.
3. Review and learn as you go
Effective reporting structures and communication pathways are gold dust when it comes to strategy implementation. That’s because they will indicate where things are on track and off track. Armed with data and insights, you’re positioned to monitor progress, identify lessons and seek opportunities to change things for the better, which can feed into the other steps of the strategy implementation lifecycle.
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Operational planning builds on your strategic plan and adds further detail. Depending on the size of your organisation, it can happen at the organisational, departmental and team level. Operational plans are a practical resource to support strategy implementation over a set timeframe. For many organisations, this is a 12 month period; in this instance, some people refer to operational planning as annual planning. A strategic plan speaks to your why and - at a high level - your when, where, what and how. An operational plan digs into and unpacks the what, who, when and how.
Put another way, operational planning maps out programs, projects and tasks that are aligned to your strategic priorities (the what). It also identifies the people responsible for progressing and achieving these activities (the who). Operational planning identifies roughly how long each piece of work will take and/or when it needs to be completed by (the when). To add further value, operational plans speak to resource requirements and interdependencies between programs, tasks and activities (the how).
In the case of annual planning, organisations are asking and answering a series of questions: what do we need to do this year to deliver on the promises and commitments in our strategic plan? Who will oversee and deliver each of these? When specifically do these things need to happen over the course of the year? How are we going to resource and connect these different programs of work?
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Operational planning enables you and your team to understand who is doing what and when. This gives people more clarity, certainty and direction. Operational planning also enables leader to prioritise and resource their strategic commitments.
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An operating model is all about how your organisation is set-up. At Ensemble Strategy, we consider there to be four key elements in every operating model – functional areas, human capacity and capability, digital assets and physical resources.
Functional areas
These are the key activities your business undertakes at a high-level. For example, a professional services firm (like us lot here at Ensemble Strategy!) may consider planning, marketing and sales, resourcing, consulting, people and culture, and finance and operations to be their six key functional areas. Each of these functions will have associated processes and considerations.
Human capacity and capability
In an operating model, the people piece is about what skills your organisation needs and in what quantities to deliver on your strategy. This can relate to specific technical skills such as cyber-security as well as more general skills like innovative thinking. It’s worth noting that, in most operating models, human capacity and capability requirements are mapped at a fairly high-level with the opportunity to build out the detail when considering your organisation’s structure (see next section below).
Digital assets
This relates to your technology requirements, including hardware and software. There has been a lot of commentary in recent years about the need for not-for-profits to accelerate their digital investment and capability. This is complicated by the ongoing debate about not-for-profit overheads, which can make it challenging to invest in technology and other back office operations.
Physical resources
This relates to non-technology assets such as buildings and equipment.
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Your operating model is hugely important as it’s all about how your organisation is set-up to achieve success. It’s important here to have a good understanding of the four key operating model elements and how they interact with one another. This understanding means you can look at – and, if necessary, change - the resources and structures that will drive outcomes. With a strong operating model in place, the different elements of your organisation fit well together to maximise what you have. Keep in mind that your operating model is not visible unless you analyse and document it.
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Your organisational structure is all about people. It’s generally represented as an org chart with boxes indicating specific roles and lines connecting positions to managers. While they can be useful in some instances, org charts definitely have their limitations so let’s take a step back and think about the key elements and concepts that underpin your organisational structure.
A first big picture question to consider is how you want to set your organisation up in different departments, teams and hierarchies to deliver on your vision? Key here is considering which areas, functions and skills will be grouped together to form business units as well as how these different areas will work with one another. For example, some organisations are structured by geographic remit, to reflect product lines, as per the company’s value chain or based on particular capabilities.
From here, we can think about which capabilities we’d like to bundle into specific roles. Populating a RACI matrix can be a useful exercise at this stage to understand who is doing what. Next comes reporting lines so we can understand what kind of structure will provide people with the managerial support they need.
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How your organisation is structured helps ensure individual roles and teams strike the balance between too much and too little work. For example, if one manager in your team has 20 direct reports and another has two, it might suggest an imbalance. Next, your organisation structure can help employees receive the necessary guidance and support. Drawing on the example above again, the manager with 20 reports might struggle to effectively manage all the people in their team. Have a clear organisational structure can also help people in your organisation know who to go to for particular information.
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At Ensemble Strategy, we think about culture as the glue that binds your team together; it may be invisible or hard to see but without it everything falls apart. This means that culture is a, if not the, critical factor in whether your organisation will successfully operate and effectively implement your strategy.
We’ve written a blog called If cash is king, culture is queen (see the ‘how’ page) because, the cliché is true, culture really does eat strategy for breakfast. Since culture is all about the beliefs, attitudes and behaviours that shape your organisation, it influences every decision and every interaction. Strong, healthy cultures make it clear how you are expected to behave and how you can expect others to behave. Weak or toxic cultures do the opposite. Organisational culture colours people’s experience of their work lives – it’s critical to whether they feel connected, appreciated and values-aligned. Understandably, this feeds into and significantly impacts your operations and strategy implementation.
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When it comes to operations and strategy implementation, there’s the theory and the reality of board and executive roles. The theory states that executives are the operational leaders with boards playing a strategic oversight role. This means non-executive directors should stay out of the weeds while supporting management and holding them to account. The reality is that some boards are incredibly operational and some are too far removed. For example, for small not-for-profits, it’s easy (and sometimes necessary) for board directors to get stuck into some operational work because otherwise there just aren’t enough financial and human resources. In our experience in the not-for-profit and broader for-purpose sector, every organisation needs to figure out exactly how board directors and management will work together to drive the greatest possible impact. Unfortunately, there’s no one single formula for success.
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There are pros and cons of engaging a consultant to help you with strategy implementation and operations. Your experience working with an external facilitator or consultant will also vary wildly depending on which firm or individual you go with. We’ve outlined some of the key points to consider below.
Pros
• Enable everyone in your board and team to participate fully in workshops and meetings, rather than someone needing to be the facilitator
• Bring in ideas from other sectors and organisations
• Alleviate internal capacity challenges
• Independent third party facilitation may elicit new or different perspectives from internal and external stakeholders
Cons
• Will incur a cost
• Some consultants don’t understand your sector and won’t understand your organisation (or will take a very long time to!)
• Risk of losing internal ownership of your strategic plan, operations and strategy implementation
Our approach to not-for-profit operations and strategy implementation
We think of our work as SENSE-making. When it comes to operations and strategy implementation, this is about ensuring everyone in your organisation knows what’s expected of them, both in terms of specific tasks and how they behave. It’s also about ensuring the broader set-up and structure of your organisation is positioning you for success and impact. Our Ensemble process for operations and strategy implementation projects is as follows:
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Scope
The first cab off the ranks is to build a collaborative and connected project team through developing clear project outcomes, deliverables, timeframes and roles. Establishing this foundation upfront, not only supports a strong partnership but also provides accountability and focus for the project.
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Engage
Meaningful engagement is central to positive experiences and achieving outcomes. It’s the activity that will enable creative solutions and ensure buy-in. When it comes to operations and strategy implementation projects, it’s absolutely vital to listen to internal stakeholders and there can sometimes be benefit in engaging with external influencers also. At Ensemble Strategy, we approach engagement in a range of forms, from direct stakeholder engagement (e.g. interviews, focus groups, citizen juries and surveys) through to indirect analysis (e.g. desk-based research and engaging subject matter experts). It ultimately leads to the gathering of insights to feed into strategy design itself.
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Navigate
With the project scoped and a wealth of insights gathered through engagement, it’s time to figure out where to from here. In this stage, we focus on really nailing the big picture solutions and options. At heart, the navigate phase is about identifying if major change is required and what form this is likely to take.
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Shape
Shaping is a combination of digesting insights, facilitating deep conversations, bringing stakeholders along on the journey and building out additional detail. This phase is the practical crafting, refining and development of the plan, model or solution. It is the facilitation of robust debate and the bringing together of different perspectives that will strengthen the thinking, identify opportunities and, ultimately, deliver something practical that will mean something to the range of audiences that engage with it.
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Execute
Execution is focused on where to from here. Depending on the project itself, the execute phase can take different forms, including a transition plan for a new operating model or a communications strategy to share and embed a new set of organisational values.
A little about the different operations and strategy implementation services we provide
We provide a range of services which fall into the operations and implementation bucket including:
Operational planning to cascade your strategic plan into a practical roadmap that will support effective strategy implementation;
Operating model design to review and enhance how your people, functions and assets are set up for success;
Organisational restructures to ensure individual roles, reporting lines, teams and departments are fit-for-purpose; and
Culture and values reviews to articulate and embed your values and beliefs, and strengthen positive ways of working.
Our favourite operations and strategy implementation tools and resources
We regularly post our reflections and insights to our Ensemble blog, which you can access here.
There are a whole range of fantastic operations and implementation resources out there. You can find a few of our favourites below:
The ACNC provide an overview of what you need to be doing to classify as a not-for-profit here, as do NFP Law here
This OnDeck article outlines some helpful operations considerations for services, products and digital businesses
McKinsey’s Insights on Operations (available here) often includes useful articles
This Harvard Business School article summarises seven key steps for strategy implementation
See here, here and here for different perspectives on not-for-profit overheads
There’s also lots of software options when it comes to operations management and strategy implementation, including Monday.com, Asana and Hubspot
