Essential Strategy Management

The Importance of Strategy Management:
Strategic management starts with strategy formulation, setting a direction that defines the future of the organization. The next step is to align the chosen strategies with external impacts and the changes needed for success in operations – this is the alignment effort. Organizations today are pursuing approaches to connect what is happening in their external environments and assess the impact on their product or service ability to deliver to customers.

Alignment: The key problem of unconnected flow of direction
Alignment is much more than documenting strategies, environment trends or status of execution. It requires linking these changes together for a more reliable plan of execution. Organizations strive to improve operational performance or just to survive some rapid change in their environment. This has created an explosion of interest in alignment for managers effectively executing decisions.

“The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence – it is to act with yesterday’s logic.” – Peter Drucker

Alignment : The current solution – Assessing Impact on Execution.
Alignment today is done piecemeal without linking the various organization structures and capabilities together for better insights. The linkage is important in effectively deploying the formulated strategies. It is one thing to analyze customer preferences and behavior and another to assess the impact of preferences on strategy, tactics, and operations. The same thinking applies to technology, social and other trends.

Strategy Management: Formulation, Alignment, Gap and more
Changes inside the organization and external to it must be assessed. An effective and productive manager should have the knowledge and skills to apply core analytics using systematic and structured methods. They should assess future trends and anticipate the impact on execution.

Managers and professionals should prepare for and assess coming changes. They should understand what to expect from applying strategic analysis techniques. This course is key for senior managers, strategic planners, marketing analysts, data analysts and architects, planning managers, process analysts.

• Explain the different components and value of strategic thinking today.
• Use analytic methods to improve strategy effectiveness.
• Understand the techniques used for the diverse types of alignment strategy analysis.
• Describe how analytics provide capability to focus strategic insight.
• Explain the technologies and tools available for assessing strategy development and execution.
• Interpret how strategic methods can help management plan and execute for success.
• Select strategy formulation approaches that promote management productivity.
• Understand the limits of strategic thinking and analytics.
• Interpret and explain the value of end-to-end strategy management.
• Suggest new usage opportunities for strategy management such as vertical and horizontal alignment and analytic analysis.
• Explain how innovation enables better strategy setting.

Who should attend

Managers and professionals should prepare and assess coming changes. They should understand what to expect from applying alignment techniques. They should assess future trends and anticipate execution impact. This course is key for senior managers, strategic planners, marketing analysts, data analysts and architects, planning managers, process analysts.

Meet your expert course trainer: Frank Kowalkowski

Frank Kowalkowski is President of Knowledge Consultants, Inc., a firm focusing on business performance, business analytics, data science, business architecture, big data, business intelligence, predictive analytics and statistical techniques. He has over 30 years of line management and consulting experience in a wide variety of industries. He has been involved with many projects both as a user and purveyor of business analytics. He has worked projects in state and federal government dealing with back office operations, legislative compliance and regulatory compliance. He has worked on the federal level with the national defense department, Coast Guard for drug interdiction and other projects. His background includes a number of industries including manufacturing, distribution, supply chain, banking, insurance, financial institutions, health care, pharmaceuticals, oil and gas and chemicals.

More recently Frank has been involved in conducting workshops, professional training sessions and assessments of architecture, data science, governance, compliance, risk and process management efforts. He also develops algorithms for analytics tools particularly semantic algorithms as well as data analysis techniques. He is often a keynote speaker, panel moderator and member at international conferences as well as a conference chair, he has written numerous papers and spoken at conferences on a variety of business subjects. He conducts frequent seminars nationally and internationally on a variety of business management, analytics and information technology topics.

He is the author of a 1996 book on Enterprise Analysis. His most recent publications are a featured chapter in the business book “Digital Transformation: Using BPM You Already Own.” for publication in 2017. His chapter is titled “Improve, Automate, Digitize”, he also has a chapter in the business architecture book titled ‘Business and Dynamic Change’ June, 2015 and a chapter on semantic process analytics in the book Passports to Success in BPM published in 2014 all are available on Amazon.

Knowledge Consultants. Inc. (KCI)

Knowledge Consultants, Inc. is a professional services firm founded in 1984. KCI provides consulting and professional education services. With over 50 courses taught worldwide, KCI provides the opportunity to develop core strengths in the following certification areas:

• Process Management
• IT Management
• Business Performance Management
• Business Analysis
• Analytical Techniques for Business
• Business and IT Architecture

KCI has expanded its training and consulting efforts internationally into Europe, Southeast Asia and the Middle East. KCI has an outstanding list of current and past clients including many of the Fortune’s 100 companies.

Consulting focuses on the key areas of Business Performance Management, Process Management, Business and IT Architecture, Business Analysis, Using Analytic Techniques for Performance Improvement and IT Management.

Day One: An Integrated Strategy Methodology

Strategy development and management. The key to simple and adaptable strategy management is using well defined and established business models integrated into a methodology. The methodology may go from a few strategy issues and problems to a series of interactive strategic options dealing with multiple organizations, products, markets, and so on. The motive for an integrated approach to strategy is reduced uncertainty and increased confidence in setting direction.

Section 1:  Strategy Management Methodology

• About strategy management today
• The high-performance organization
• What makes strategy management adaptable?
• The value of integrated strategy management
• Business models and strategy management
• The value proposition for improved strategy management
• Video Discussion – Setting Strategy for an Organization

Section 2: Strategy  Process Overview

• Strategy methodology steps
• Situation analysis the core of strategy formulation
• Alignment, making sure direction is followed.
• External influence assessment that drives strategy
• Gap analysis, the key to assured results
• Exercise and Discussion – What is your strategy methodology?

Section 3: Strategic Development and Expectations

• The strategy development project
• Resources needed for good strategy development results.
• Using and upgrading existing strategy efforts
• The emerging interest in reverse alignment – bottom up.
• What you need to know for strategic excellence
• Exercise – What analytics do you use?

Day Two: Strategy Formulation the Core of Strategy Management

Strategy formulation is about what structure you need for success. It is based on considering the strategic direction your organization has identified. Formulation identifies the direction and feeds the alignment. That means understanding the linkage from external issues to the strategies. Management must integrate what is going on in the environment with what strategies and objectives are needed to drive the organization forward.

Section 4:  Strategy Formulation – Key Questions

• What do we mean by strategy formulation?
• What strategy should you pursue?
• What industry are you in?
• What purpose do you pursue?
• Defining the four perspectives of an organization
• Documenting the strategic approach
• Video Discussion – Setting Strategy for an Organization

Section 5:  The sources of Formulation Insight

• The role of management model
• SWOT the most common insight
• Strategy maps a
• Value Chains and the 5 forces
• Opportunity insight – Red Ocean/Blue Ocean
• Exercise – Where do you get your strategies from?

Section 6: Evaluating external influences

• Key issues with strategy alignment
• Planning Environment/Strategy perspectives for alignment:
• What are external influences?
• Using PESTLE-MB to identify influences.
• Describing the impact of external influences
• Exercise – Ranking External Influences

Day three: Alignment – From External Environment to Operations

Alignment is a step beyond analysis of financials or quantitative factors. Those are used to help identify the purpose of alignment such as improving profits, increasing the number of products, or creating a higher quality service. Describing, linking, and analyzing the external and strategic perspective has value in setting the direction of the organization that drives tactics and execution.

Section 7:  The Value of Organizational Alignment

• What is alignment?
• Why is it important?
• The value proposition of alignment
• Management productivity and value
• Managing the scope of alignment
• Gathering alignment data
• Video and Discussion – What is Alignment?

Section 8:  Setting Direction – The strategic view

• Strategy formulation and strategic perspective?
• What core strategic components should you use?
• Strategies, goals, objectives, initiatives, innovations, risks, opportunities
• The role of management models like:
• Balanced scorecard, value chain, red/blue ocean etc.
• Describing the impact and value of the strategic perspective
• Ranking strategic options with risk/yield factors
• Exercise – Defining Strategic Components

Section 9:  Aligning strategies with the environment.

• How do you link external influences with strategies?
• Where do AI and machine learn fit?
• What outcome are you looking for with his linkage?
• Inferencing impact
• Finding hidden impacts
• Focusing on potential high impact linkages
• Interactive Demonstration – Strategic Impact Analysis

Day four: Gap Analysis – The Analytic Approach

Gap analysis today is done by comparing actual outcomes with expected outcomes. The comparison is based on monetary and quantitative outcome goals. This is an ‘after the fact’ information approach that is useful for detecting that there is an issue. You need to know why the difference happened. Typically a management would take an ‘external action’ that is, reducing costs, increasing prices, etc. that manipulates the symptom but not solving the problem. That is playing ‘whack a mole’ with the outcomes.

Section 10:  Current gap analysis issues

• The problems with gap analysis today
• The focus on financial and quantitative outcomes
• Focusing on the problem not the symptom
• Introducing advanced analytics for gap analysis
• An analytic workflow for gap analysis
• Exercise – Tactical Alignment Categories

Section 11: Defining the gap

• Start with the outcome expectations.
• Add the outcome actuals.
• Calculate the differential of actual/expected.
• Identify the expected and actual property relationships.
• Identify the alignment relationships of interest.
• Exercise – Analyzing properties of strategic methodology components

Section 12:  Bridging the gap – the gap workflow

• Filtering initial analytic results
• Execute gap analytic workflow.
• Interpreting the results
• Filtering, tuning and focusing the insight.
• Articulating the gap bridge
• Interactive Demonstration and Discussion – A Linkage Analysis

Day five: Innovation and Strategy – Capturing Creative Thinking

Long term survival and growth of an organization depends on how good they are at identifying new, dying, changing, or alternative directions, A key approach in strategy management is adding an innovation module. Small or large such efforts shake the cobwebs out of stagnant strategy formulation. A patented innovation approach such as rethink2innovate, an ideation technique is most useful here. The goal is to find the right opportunities for your organization. It links insight to foresight, problem to opportunity. Coupling this with strategy formulation provides an organization with some unique paths forward.

Section 13:  Innovation and strategy formulation

• The emerging value of innovation
• The Rethink2Innovate process
• Gathering and selecting ideas
• Evaluating and transforming
• Initiating the innovation portfolio
• Exercise – Listing innovation opportunities

Section 14: Innovation and Strategy Alignment

• Cascading innovation
• Capturing external environment influences
• Integrating innovation and strategy
• Integrating with alignment
• Exercise – An innovation example

Section 15:  Developing the Plan – Putting it all together

• Executing the strategy methodology
• Resources needed for success.
• Preparing the deployment plan
• Issues you deal with
• Silos, multiple strategy set, multiple business units etc.
• Q&A and wrap – The Take Aways from this Course