To finish what I started last week, I’m going to run down the other five of my Top 10 ways to ensure your organization will successfully execute its strategy.

(5) Start executing.  Don’t wait until you think you have the perfect strategy.  In this case, perfect is the enemy of good enough.  A lot of organizations I work with – particularly nonprofits and educational organizations – tend to want to get everything right first, before even sticking a toe in the water of executing. 

What are the key things you need to do to ensure your organization successfully executes its strategy?  So many organizations and their consultants are concerned with developing the greatest strategic plan that they fail to focus on actually implementing the strategy.  The following are the first five of our top 10 ways to ensure you successfully execute your strategy.

The first, and perhaps most important, thing to do to ensure successful execution of your organization’s strategy is to put a company star in charge of strategy (e.g., make them the VP of strategy) and make successful execution of the strategy one of their annual performance measures that will determine their overall employee rating and their bonus.  Organizations get things done when they hold people accountable for getting things done.  Hold a high-performing employee accountable for implementing your strategy.

Often when I kick off a project with a new client and we are setting out our initial milestones and project goals the conversation turns to how often change projects fail and what can be done to prevent failure. They ask: What is the key to our project succeeding?

To ensure the success of a strategic change project such as a Balanced Scorecard implementation, the client should appoint a high-level project manager who will be held accountable for the project’s success.

To continue the conversation from earlier in the week about strategic measures, I wanted to tell a story from another client about identifying the right measures for your strategy and how sometimes the answer is right there in front of your face, but you don’t even know it.

The team was struggling to come up with the right measures for the objective “Provide staff with the tools, information, and knowledge they need to succeed”.  In my experience, this is a common concept for an objective in the Learning & Growth Perspective of a Balanced Scorecard.  This type of objective may often require two measures – one to track each of (1) tools and (2) information and knowledge”.

Over the past few weeks, I have been working with a client to help them identify the strategic measures they will use to track their progress in implementing their enterprise-level Balanced Scorecard (BSC) objectives.  This is always the most difficult part of developing a BSC, in my opinion.

There were a few strategic objectives for which they were really having trouble identifying the right measures.  The first concerned ensuring they had a good analytics capability, the second dealt with ingraining a culture of strategy, and the third focused on making sure they deepened their understanding of their potential customers.