« The Archestra Lexicon | Main | Permission versus Approval in Governance »

May 23, 2005

Aligning Operations and Strategy

"So, you know how to get there, right?"

In business, results rule. Understanding the results of operations is typically the dominant issue in management communications between different levels and departments of a company.

This accumulated understanding is key to synchronizing operations throughout the enterprise; and by providing end-to-end support for fulfilling business requests, that synchronicity allows current priorities to be a successfully demanding driver of operations.

But different parts of the organization respond to different kinds of requests. Over time, if a common awareness of objectives is lost, the request-driven results being observed more easily diverge from strategy, and those results are then much harder to use as representations or predictors of future performance.

To minimize or prevent this divergence, the organization needs a shared and consistent view of the big picture -- consistency that provides an on-demand ability to refresh the awareness of shared objectives, across the multiple parties involved in the pursuit and across the multiple occasions in which action must be prioritized.

"Honey, please stop and ask for directions..."

The organization's most consistent view of a strategy comes not from the analysis of results but from the enterprise-wide publication of the plan.

Drawn from that awareness, a management-grade depiction of planned organizational readiness would cover the state of the organization spanning all possible states to all actual states.

Put that way, the task first seems to require a prohibitively large amount of descriptive information; yet ordinarily the company fully attends to getting that scope of information by capturing it through processes and the systems that host those processes. With the numerous information sources, creating the "big picture" is not done through brute force but instead through compiling surgical slices of observations that are each shaped by a particular point-of-view. Because there can be an almost unlimited variety in the points-of-view, the classic problem is to prioritize them, and then to coordinate the ones that are most important. The compilation is a model.

This model helps to reveal, remedy, and support key interdependencies amongst the differing responsibilities and authorities that run the business day-to-day. Consequently, it is seen as a critical success factor in understanding how the organization is really functioning.

But what is the model's prevailing logic for coordinating those differing views? Is the logic oriented towards explaining results or towards monitoring objectives?

"Are you sure we can get there from here?"

We want to say that the logic must be oriented to both... but this rarely happens except in product management or in project management.

Outside of those two domains, there still needs to be a framework in which operations are synchronized in a way that can account for both objectives and results, while allowing changing priorities to be flexibly accommodated.

This framework must take into account the different perspectives on organizational readiness that are usually established by managers. The question: what is the organization ready for? In taking responsibilities for issues ranging from all possible to all actual states, "management" sees selected, authorized, and assigned states.

But while managers are doing that, operations must make things happen through the front-lines perspective on current demand versus its capabilities to respond. The operational perspective recognizes and must handle constraints that appear in another spectrum of concerns -- going from demand, to associated requirements, to response options, and then final responses.

A key management problem is that organizational readiness and operational perspective can develop independently of each other as separate pre-dispositions -- without productively converging or co-operating. This source of misalignment must be rigorously minimized.

"Okay that's it. Gimme the keys."

The Archestra framework cross-references the organizational and operational issues.

On the organizational side, the problem is to correctly determine the positioning of the organizational unit within the implications of the strategy. On the operational side, the problem is to identify the availability factors that underpin decisions and responses.

When organizational positioning and operational availability are reconciled, the proper throughput of energies is established for objectives to drive results. Alignment solutions must provide support for the intersection of positioning and availability.

Copyright 2004 M. Ryder
Click here for an enlarged detail of the populated framework, showing the reconciliation touchpoints.
For a review of how to develop solution models from the framework, contact me via email.

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at May 23, 2005 7:05 AM

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.malcolmryder.com/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/49

Comments

Post a comment