Strategic implementation process

Strategic execution procedureImplementing Strategies the step that differentiates between success and failure of strategic planning.AbstractTo discuss in detail, the strategic implementation process and alike to understand the counseling and operational nuances of a successful implementation. The topic spans across vital tools such as annual objectives, organizational structure, reengineering, functioning culture and process improvements. The look paper also brings come in the ch totallyenges of implementation, which be much complex to solve, and makes it even more difficult to implement the formulated strategies. This research also authenticates the fact that there is a pre-requirement for special set of programs/ initiatives etc to prepare an organization towards change in the basis of peoples acceptance towards the saucily implementation. (www.csuchico.edu/mgmt/strategy/ mental faculty/sld044.html)Literature Re persuasionThe strategy charge process does non end when t he satisfying decides what strategy to pursue. There must be a translation of strategic thought into strategic action. This translation is much easier if the managers and the employees of the firm understand the business, feels as part of the company, committed to the organizations strategic intent.Implementing a strategy affects the firm from top to quarter it also affects all the operable/ di imagingal areas of business. Even the most technically perfect strategy plan will serve little purpose if it is not implemented.Many organizations tend to spend an inordinate amount of money, time and resources in developing strategic plans solely lets them wither out once change or uncertainty creeps in, failure of implementation is not only if a setback but erodes the confidence of the firm and brings it back to worse than the pre-strategic scenarios leading to management failure and organization chaos.Research Aims ObjectivesStartegy formulation concepts and tools do not differ greatl y between small, large or bigger firms, but the implementation varies good among different types and sizes of organizations. As the implementation will affect many aspects of the organization like the altering of sales territories, diffuseing financial budgets, changes in the pricing illustration, developing new employee benefits, establishing cost-control procedures, changing marketing approaches, building on infrastructures for ehnaced products and services, better management information systems, launching new organization wide development projects and initiatives. This research paper barely focusses on these aspects and try to elucidate the managerial and operational perspectives in breif details with respect to strategy implementation.Research MethodologyAn individual project research showing many corporate strategies internet links, strategic business books, executive management journals, the Harvard Business Review magazines and various case studies. Some articles were a lso used as references in the Strategy Focused Organization written by the Robert Kaplan David Norton duos. Few were read from various SEM websites, through the search engine Google. It is more of a background signal based literature research and translating the understanding into research paper/ article.Discussion Management PerspectivesThe transition from formulation to implementation requires a shift un responsibility from strategists to divisional/ functional managers. Managers and employees are motivated more on perceived self-interest than organizational interest, hence it is essential for the top management to translate these goals in junction with their personal/ functional goals, so a message is sent across that achieving these small set of goals leads to achieve the super ordinate organizational goals. These will let the management focus on establishing annual objectives and then breaking them down to functional objectives, devising policies and procedures to act as a general guideline for steerage the functionalities, followed by allocating resources (material, money and men), restructuring and regrouping if necessary to align to the need of the organizations strategy, structured communication programs to wither resistance for change, revising the rewards and the incentives plans, developing a strategic support culture, adapting to interactive operational and production processes and developing an effective HR function.Management changes are necessarily more extensive when strategies to be implemented move a firm in a major new direction. The managers should start involving in strategy implementation process right from the early stages so as to maintain the trueness towards the end results and transfer the confidence to grass root level so that their team members are also motivated to take a shit towards the agreed objectives both functional and organizational. Top-down flow of communication is essential for developing bottom-up support. Ev ery employee should be able to benchmark his/her efforts against best-in-class competitors so that the challenge constrains personal, on the other(a) attain the firm should provide the best training for both managers and employees to ensure that they film to acquire and maintain skills necessary to be world-class performers.Strategic management should not become self-perpetuating bureaucratic mechanism. Rather it must be a reflective acquire process that familiarizes managers and employers in the organization with key strategic issues and feasible alternatives for solvent those issues. It must not become ritualistic, stilted, orchestrated or too formal, predictable and rigid. Always remember to keep the strategic management process simple but effective, jargon-free but content rich. Words supported by numbers should be represented as the medium for explaining strategic issues and organizational responses. A key consumption of strategist is to facilitate continuous organization change and learning that enhances the next perspective production operations (HR, Learning, Culture and Leadership aspects as well).Discussion toil/ Operations (Learning, HR) PerspectiveThe production or operations perspective constitute more than 70% of the firms total routine strategy or operational strategy. These limitations foundation meaningfully enhance the risk of non-attainment of the desired objectives as they are back bone of the business development/ market expansion focuses of the organization. Production related decisions on plant size, plant locations, product design, choice of equipments, kind of tooling, size of inventory, inventory control, quality control, cost control, use of standards, job specialization, employee training, equipment and resource utilizations, shipping and packaging and expert innovations can have a dramatic impact on the success or failure of strategy-implementation efforts.Factors that should be studied before locating production facil ities involve the availability of resources, make or outsource decisions, margin of production costings, the location of major markets, political risks in the area/ region. For high technology companies, production be may not be as important as production flexibilities because major product changes can happen more frequently. This also results in cross-training of employees in various production platforms leading toReduction in substantial investments in training learning activities.Workers skill level gets cross-pollinated and resulting in higher efficiency.It can reduce the thrust of managers responsibility in training/ and make them focus more towards coaching and mentoring.It reduces time gaps and hence gains on productivity levels are easily expected.You have to understand your industry well to develop the connection between process improvements and outputs achieved. Take three divisional examples of cycle-time measurement, a common process measure. For much of our falsifyi ng business, no premium is earned for early delivery. And the contracts allow for reimbursement of inventory holding costs. Therefore, attempts to reduce inventory or cycle times in this business conjure no benefit for which the customer is willing to pay. The only benefits from cycle time or inventory reduction occur when reduction in factory-floor complexity leads to tangible reductions in product cost. The output performance targets must be real cash savings, not reduced inventory levels or cycle times.In contrast, signifi cant lead-time reductions could be achieved for our packaging machinery business. This improvement led to lower inventory and an option to access an additional 35% of the market. In this case, the cycle-time improvements could be tied to specific targets for increase sales and market share. It wasnt linear, but output seemed to improve each time we improved throughput times.And in one of our agricultural machinery businesses, orders come within a delineate t ime window each year. The current build cycle is longer than the ordering window, so all units must be built to the sales forecast. This process of building to forecast leads to high inventory-more than twice the levels of our other businesses-and frequent overstocking and obsolescence of equipment. Incremental reductions in lead time do little to change the economics of this operation. just now if the build cycle time could be reduced to less than the six-week ordering time window for part or all of the build schedule, then a breakthrough occurs. The division can shift to a build-to-order schedule and eliminate the excess inventory caused by building to forecasts. In this case, the benefit from cycle-time reductions is a step-function that comes only when the cycle time drops below a critical level.So here we have three businesses, three different processes, all of which could have elaborate systems for measure quality, cost, and time but would feel the impact of improvements in r adically different ways. With all the diversity in our business units, senior management really cant have a detailed understanding of the relative impact of time and quality improvements on each unit. All of our senior managers, however, understand output targets, curiously when they are displayed with historical trends and prospective targets.The concept of learning organization (cultural intervention in strategy) is emphasized here as part of the changing business model to suit the strategic intent. Learning organizations are characterized by total employee involvement in a process of collaboratively conducted, collectively accountable change directed towards divided values or principles. (Watkins and Marsick 1992 118). The basic rationale for such organizations is that in situations of rapid change only those that are flexible, adaptive and productive will excel. For this to happen, it is argued, organizations need to keep how to tap peoples commitment and capacity to learn a t all levels. While all people have the capacity to learn, the structures in which they have to function are often not conducive to reflection and engagement. Furthermore, people may lack the tools and guiding ideas to make sense of the situations they face. Organizations that are continually expanding their capacity to nominate their future require a fundamental shift of mind among their members.When you ask people about what it is like being part of a great team, what is most spectacular is the meaningfulness of the experience. People talk about being part of something larger than them, of being connected, of being generative. It becomes quite clear that, for many, their experiences as part of truly great teams stands out as singular periods of life lived to the fullest. Some spend the rest of their lives looking for ways to recapture that spirit. For motherfucker Senge, real learning gets to the heart of what it is to be human. We become able to re-create ourselves. This appli es to both individuals and organizations. Thus, for a learning organization it is not enough to survive. Survival learning or what is more often termed adaptive learning is important indeed it is necessary. But for a learning organization, adaptive learning must be joined by generative learning, learning that enhances our capacity to createThe learning organizations require a new view of leadership. He sees the traditional view of leaders (as special people who set the direction, make key decisions and induce the troops as deriving from a deeply individualistic and non-systemic worldview. At its centre the traditional view of leadership, is based on assumptions of peoples powerlessness, their lack of personal vision and inability to master the forces of change, deficits which can be remedied only by a few great leaders. Against this traditional view he sets a new view of leadership that centers on subtler and more important tasks.In a learning organization, leaders are designers, stewards and teachers. They are responsible for building organizations were people continually expand their capabilities to understand complexity, clarify vision, and improve shared mental models that is they are responsible for learning. Learning organizations will remain a good idea until people groom a stand for building such organizations. Taking this stand is the first leadership act, the start of inspiring (literally to breathe life into) the vision of the learning organization, which is also part of the structural intervention, a part of planned change or Organization Development.ConclusionSuccessful Strategy formulation does not at all guarantee successful strategy implementation, although they are sequential in nature, but the latter simply means the change actually. It is widely agreed that the real work starts after strategies are formulated. It is sometimes frightening to think a single individual, a system failure, a process hiccup or a impress structure would comple tely sabotage the success of the strategic implementation and achievement of the agreed objectives. So the actual grounds have to prepare in terms of managing human resources and political relationships, creating a strategy supporting conducive climate/ culture, adapting to the right kind of systems, operations and processes.Depending on the size and type of the organization other management issues could be equally important to successful strategic implementation.ReferencesDale McConkey, Planning in a Changing Environment, Business Horizons, September October 1988 66.S. Ghoshal C.A. Bartlett, Changing the role of management beyond structure to processes, HBR 73, 1(1995) 88 90.www.hbr.org How important is personal goal alignment in Strategic Objectives, article by Thomas Strickland in 1998 (White Papers Category).Richard Brown, outsider CEO Inspiring changes with force and grace, USA Today (July 19, 1999) 3B.H. Igor Ansoff, Strategic Management of Technology, Journal of Busine ss Strategy 7, no 3 (Winter 1987) 38.Jack Duncan, Management (New York haphazard House, 1983) 381-390.Translating strategies into action, course notes on published by HBS Feb 1990.Robert Waterman Jr. How the better get best?, Business Week (September 14th 1987) 104-105.Implementing Strategies Management Operations Issue, Fred R. David, south-central Carolina University, 2006 Prentice Hall Edition, 245 261.T. Deal A. Kennedy, Culture A new look through the old lenses, Journal of Applied Behavioral Sciences 19, no4 (1983), 498 504.Peter Senge on Learning Organizations in the American Management Journal, (Senge 1990 340)Harris Dawn, Constance E. Helfat and Paul J Wolfson the pipeline to the top, the Academy of Management Perspectives 20, No 4 (2006) 42.James C Wimbush, speckle on Human Resources Management, Business Horizon 49, No 6 (Nov-Dec 2006) 433Robert Simons, Control in the Age of Empowerment, Harvard Business Review (March-April 1995) 80.Readings from Strategic Manageme nt by Charles W.L. hill Gareth R. Jones, 4th Reprinted 2000 Millennium Edition.