It’s a new year and the time when teams look to the months ahead with unblinking optimism. Maybe you’ve already planned a strategy to delight your core customer and focus on product innovation. Or perhaps you’re still working toward alignment on high-level goals.
No matter which stage you’re in — goal-setting, planning, or execution — it’s all hard work. And even harder still is actually seeing that strategy through to execution with proper tracking and team alignment every step of the way.
But there’s good news: There are plenty of existing tools and frameworks out there to make it easier. Here are a few of my favorite resources that can empower your team to work smarter, with better traceability and transparency, to keep those critical business initiatives on track.
Stage 1: Find a framework for your strategic goal-setting
Goal-setting is a necessary exercise, especially for Agile teams. Goals provide a clear North Star vision for everyone to rally behind. But staring at a blank canvas with the word “Goals” scrawled across the top can feel daunting and tedious for even the most productive teams.
Here are some proven approaches that can help:
Objectives and Key Results (OKRs)
The goal-setting framework of Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) is probably familiar to most. Popularized first by Andrew Grove at Intel in the 1970s, it was subsequently catapulted to the mainstream business consciousness by John Doerr, who implemented the concept at Google. Today, OKRs are used by enterprises all over the world.
Obeya Rooms
Obeya Rooms is another strategic collaboration approach that was created by Toyota in the 1990s during the production of the Prius. The idea is that all relevant information is available to everyone via a single physical, virtual, or hybrid workspace. There, visualization aids collaboration on strategy, planning, and/or execution. Continuous improvement and KPIs are then incorporated into the rhythm of business to ensure alignment.
Lean Portfolio Management (LPM)
Lean Portfolio Management (LPM) from the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) is another approach that aims to keep strategy in continuous alignment with execution. Agile teams using LPM focus on how to deliver value to customers quickly and efficiently and allocate funds toward high-value opportunities. When the funding strategy is linked to a portfolio vision, operations, and lean governance, all the parts work together to drive better alignment and coordination across the portfolio.
There are many additional frameworks, such as the Personify Strategic Planning Framework, UnFix Strategic Dimensions, Bets and Objectives, and others that propose similar approaches. You can, of course, design your own approach that makes the most sense for your organization. Just remember that you should design your strategic goal-setting system to be as lightweight and transparent as possible and appropriate for your context.
In need of more inspiration? Browse strategy and planning templates in the Miroverse! →
Stage 2: Align your goals, then communicate them
Once you’ve landed on how you’ll approach goal-setting, it’s time to set some goals and determine your strategy to achieve them. Because strategic planning isn’t usually a solo activity, you’ll also need to think through your approach for how to align the various stakeholders involved at this stage of the process, too.
To launch the process, using an exercise like this Team Alignment Template can be helpful to align on your goals, and ensure everyone is onboard. An exercise like this one helps to set expectations, decide on ownership, and decide how to effectively broadcast that information. What is the necessary cadence of reporting at this stage to keep everyone aligned? Clear communications from the outset are key to ensure proper understanding and buy-in.
Some additional questions to think about at this stage of planning:
- How can everyone stay synced?
- How do we stay focused on both short-term goals and the higher-level strategy?
- How can we show progress toward goals?
- How do we communicate this progress more broadly?
Now it’s time to take those strategic goals and break them down into concrete actions across various teams. Finally, with the strategy set, the approach communicated, and buy-in achieved, it’s time to turn your attention to tooling and approaches on how to visualize the work.
Stage 3: Visualize your plan of attack
This is where the hard work really begins. It requires everyone to be aligned, decide on implementation details, place bets, and design experiments. It’s hard, messy, and sometimes siloed work that impacts all areas of the company. To keep all teams aligned, it’s important to settle on a system or artifact for tracking and reporting. This ensures transparency and traceability as you all go about reaching your strategic vision.
This strategy and execution board example is a good place to start. It’s a perfect example of a vertical strategic hierarchical structure in action. The high-level vision is at the top and is connected down through multiple layers of initiatives at the portfolio level to epics at the program level — all the way through to the delivery work being done at the team level. Your own hierarchy might look different, use different descriptors, or have more or fewer levels, but the principle is the same. You can design your own artifact that reflects the interplay of delivery work and strategic goals to ensure traceability and understand how all the delivery work relates to the broader strategic vision.
The two major advantages of this approach are the traceability and transparency it brings to all levels of the organization, and the fact that it’s easy to use for multiple different audiences, whether you’re a program manager, portfolio manager, team lead, or senior leader.
Stage 4: Iterate as strategic needs shift
It all boils down to you and your team’s individual needs. When it comes to finding the best ways to connect your strategy with execution, striking the right balance can be a real challenge. It requires you to keep the approach as lightweight as possible while still communicating critical updates and information to the right stakeholders, with enough adaptability to allow for necessary (and inevitable) shifts in strategy that occur as conditions change.
Just remember: Flexibility and iteration on the template are key to ensuring you continue to support the strategy and execution accurately and cleanly.
