The magical 10 minutes – part 4
Strategy Alignment Check in just 10 min.
This is the 4th post in the series “The Magical 10 minutes”.
How long does it take to check if your management team is pulling and pushing in the same direction?
10 minutes!
The first blog post explained how you could ask yourself and each member of your management team to prioritize the 6 sources for financial growth.
The second blog post dealt with assessing the competitive environment.
The post #3 was about how to check if you all agree on what is your Customer Value Proposition.
In this post #4 we will share some real life examples. As you can most likely appreciate, few companies are prepared to share their internal misalignment with the world. All companies are therefore made anonymous.
The 6 sources of financial growth.
You may recall the 6 sources of financial growth:
- Revenue growth in new markets
- Revenue growth from new customers
- Revenue growth from new products
- Revenue growth from existing customers
- Optimise asset utilization
- Improve the cost structure
Your management team should have a clear picture of the company priorities on the 6 sources of financial growth. Your objectives, your strategy and action plans will be tightly related to how you set these priorities.
Now take a look at the result from a real life test. In a recent strategy alignment check we did for an Independent Software Vendor we got the following result.
How will the company’s executive management prioritize the following in the future? (Please tick only 1 per row and column) 1 = Highest priority – 6 = Lowest priority:
Outcome from an alignment check by an Independent Software Vendor
As you can see the answers are all over the place. 58% of the management team agreed that “Revenue growth from new customers” was the highest priority, while 25% gave that a priority 4 or lower. The team was really split on how important the existing customers were!! Also how big a role new products should play was not fully clear to this management team.
Having the discussion in the management team it turned out that some of the team members had answered based on their personal priorities. A couple of hours of discussions later they all agreed what the priorities for the company were.
This series of blog posts on alignment uses concepts from the ValuePerform strategy framework.
