| Execution Readiness is the ability of an organization to implement an execution management process. After you create your strategy blue-print and business plan, the execution management process enables you to translate this strategy into reality. As you design your EM process (which includes designing and generation of scorecards, performance review sessions, individual performance management and strategic alignment), you need to look at the readiness factors and evolve your EM process accordingly. A highly sophisticated EM process in a low readiness organization is recipe for failure. You will generally not find an organization at the low end of readiness. Most of the organizations hover within a wide range between the two extremes.
Environment of accountability
High Readiness- People taking responsibility for their actions, decisions and the consequences AND All tasks and goals have single accountability. There is only one name who is the owner of a goal OR an initiative.
Low Readiness- Lack of single point accountability. Environment of 'shared accountability'.
TIPS for Low Readiness-
- An ideal EM process will be a big cultural shock for a low readiness organization. The fix here is more in the strategic planning process, where in the business planning phase, you assign a single name against each goal. To ease resistance, you can define the 'supporting' owners.
- Make a process whereby a function spends a good time with supporting stakeholders before the enterprise level performance review. This will allow the key parties to settle any differences of opinions on the performance and the reasons thereof. For example- CIO and head of Ops to agree on the issues and root-causes of a business process automation initiative, before going to management meeting.
Business Intelligence and Performance Reporting Environment
A good BI environment will enable you to generate Scorecards & Dashboard, and also investigation and analysis on your performance results.
High Readiness- An evolved BI environment with enterprise level Data Warehouse along with sophisticated performance reports, analytics and data mining tool. One is able to mostly automate generation of dashboard and scorecards. One also has a workflow mechanism by which the scorecard generation and prelim review can be done through a work-flow tool.
Low Readiness- You having preliminary and scattered BI environments existing at functional levels. Most of the dashboards and scorecards are generated manually. The level of accuracy is suspect, and there are mismatches across the reports generated by different functions.
TIPS for low readiness environment-
- Go slow in - Start at functional level and test your EM process. Fix the accuracy equation with in the function, before taking it to the enterprise level.
- Go slow- Don't make extensive sets of dashboards and scorecards. Identify the critical sets, and proceed to fix the generation process so that they are accurate and consistent.
Intensity and sophistication of Strategic Planning process and strategic planning group
High Readiness-A responsible strategic planning group can be a great enablers for a good EM process and environment. If your strategic planning group is having a good cross-functional management and facilitation skills, it can help you build the enterprise execution management environment.
Low Readiness- A strategic planning group, which mainly consolidating the submission from individual functions. It does not have the roles of facilitating strategic planning, OR challenging the submissions.
TIPS for low readiness environment:
- Get your strategic planning group in shape first, as that will build the culture of enterprise level management of performance related processes.
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