Cascading Your Strategy

10/6/2016
CascadingYourStrategyIntrafocus
Cascading Your Strategy

Mar 31, 2015 | Balanced Scorecard, Strategy Maps
You could almost (but not quite) say it was easy to create a company strategy. The
executive management team are running the business, they have been picked to drive the
business forward and therefore it follows they should be able to create a compelling
strategy that everyone understands. The reality however, is that after the top-line strategy
is created, the team are given the task to cascade the strategy into the organisation and
everyone hopes, through some miracle, it will be successfully implemented.
It is at this point, implementation, where strategies tend to fail. The Strategic Process
stops at the executive level. Or worse still the top-line set of strategic objectives are forced
into the operational departments for interpretation. How many times has a strategic
objective like Improve Customer Satisfaction been pushed into a service area like the
Information Technology department and been reinterpreted to focus on the IT groups
internal customers? The intent of the objective was to focus on external customers and
the result is a focus on internal customers.
When cascading strategic objectives there is a key question that must be asked it is:
In what way can our department impact on <name the strategic objective>?
This should lead the department down a route that forces it to examine internal processes
and how they can be changed or augmented or even replaced to support the company
strategic objective. For example, if the IT group were to look at the company strategic
objective Improve Customer Satisfaction and ask the question above they might end up
looking at improved service delivery time or improved service reliability or get more
specic and look at improved billing accuracy.
Asking the right question provides a good start, this needs to be supported by providing a
good framework/process to ensure strategic objectives are cascaded eectively. The
balanced scorecard provides a good cascade tool. It starts with a model called the
Integrated Strategy Map. This format should be used at the corporate level and then at
every departmental level as well. (Please note there is a PowerPoint template available
containing all of the following slides). The Integrated Strategy Map contains all of the
elements required for an eective strategy including Vision, Mission, Strategic Themes,
Strategic Objectives, Measures, Targets and Initiatives.
https://www.intrafocus.com/2015/03/cascadingyourstrategy/
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This is an example of an Integrated Strategy Map:
For the purpose of this cascading illustration we will just use the Strategy Map part of the
Integrated Strategy Map. Cascading Strategic Objectives is the most important part of the
process. Measures, Targets and Initiatives dont always get cascaded, they come into being
as a result of the cascaded Strategic Objectives. However, it is important to reiterate: every
department will have a full Integrated Strategy Map.
A Company level Strategy Map might look something like this:
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If we take this map and give it to the Information Technology department, the rst thing
they should do is ask of each strategic objective In what way can our department impact
on <name of strategic objective>? The result might be something like the picture below.
Here we can see that all of the company objectives (in blue) in the nancial layer have
remained in place. These WILL NOT be worked on by the IT department but remain in
place as a REFERENCE only. One of the company objectives in the customer layer has been
removed and all of the company objectives in the process and capacity layers have been
removed, modied or replaced with IT specic objectives (in green). What is abundantly
clear however, is the IT group is contributing to the company strategy.
Information Technology Strategy Map:
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The following example looks at the Marketing department. Here we see a very dierent
story. The company objectives (in blue and left for reference only) have been left in the
Capacity layer and the Financial layer. In this instance the Marketing group require support
from the undelaying layers to do their job eectively and so have left these objectives in
place (we will see that they get picked up by other areas). The Marketing contribution is in
the Customer and Process layers. There is a potential argument that they should improve
their skills (in the Capacity layer) to be able to achieve their objectives, but it could be
equally assumed that they have the skills already, but they have not been successfully
deployed at this point in time.
Marketing Strategy Map
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The next example looks at the Human Resources department. Here again we can see that
the several of the company objectives (in blue and left for reference only) have been left in
place and the Human Resources department has added some supporting objectives.
There are a couple of interesting things to note in this example, rst the HR department
felt they could make no contribution to the Company Objective Improve Market
Perception and have replaced the whole line with a series of objectives related to an
aspect of their departments purpose to ensure company alignment. This is valid, the new
line will support the nancial objectives. Second, they have looked at how they can impact
the company objective Decrease Operating Costs and focused on another department
purpose, that of recruitment. The assumption here is if they improve the recruitment
process and hire better skilled people, this will result in an overall decrease in operating
costs.
Human Resources Strategy Map
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The next two examples follow the same logic. They ask the question In what way can our
department impact on <name the strategic objective>? and produce a department
specic strategy map that includes elements from the company strategy map (for
reference only, they will not be worked on by the departments) and the modied/new
department specic strategic objectives.
Networks Strategy Map
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BillingStrategy Map:
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It should be possible, in theory, to combine all of the strategy maps to create one master
map that contains all of the interrelationships. In practice, this is often very dicult simply
because there are too many elements and too little space. However, the principle still
holds true.
For more information on the Integrated Strategy Map take a look at the Intrafocus Insight:
Integrated Strategy Maps. To see this in the context of the full process go to the Nine Steps
to Success.
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This is an example of an Integrated Strategy Map:

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