I’ve recently been working with a client to review progress with the new strategy they developed last year. One of the most useful exercises we undertook was to use the Importance-Progress matrix attached.

It can be tempting to believe that, once the strategy and its related plans have been signed off, everything is of equal value. That’s not true. Some things are simply far more important than others.

The other major conclusion for my client was that it is tempting to try and do too many things and, in particular, it is too easy to incorporate projects into a plan that don’t add sufficient value. We fixed that issue through this exercise.

We reviewed each of the ongoing projects on two dimensions:

1. Importance. For each project we gave it a score out of 10 based on its overall profit impact and its strategic importance (ability to develop important new capabilities, or take the company into new markets).
2. Progress. Again, we scored each project out of 10 based on its performance against the milestones they developed a year or so ago.

We then mapped the projects on the matrix, allocating each project to one of four boxes:

1. Drop. Several projects ended up here. These stalling, but relatively unimportant, projects had been a source of major frustration, but my client saw that they could be dropped (although we refined the objectives for a couple of them and merged them with other initiatives).
2. Delegate. We realised that these projects weren’t as important as they first thought. Although progress had been made, and my client decided to let the projects run, they were taken off the monthly review of the business-wide strategy, and were overseen by departmental heads.
3. Drive. These projects were making good progress and we identified areas where we could accelerate future progress.
4. Deal with. These were the problem projects. We reviewed each of the projects in more detail, identified the underlying causes of the delays and developed refreshed action plans. In short, these initiatives were put on the critical list, and are now subject to weekly progress reviews until they start to hit their milestones regularly.

How is your strategy progressing, and which of your projects are getting in the way of your organisation’s success?

© Stuart Cross 2010. All rights reserved.

Every six months I pull together a collection of my best articles, from this blog, my newsletter and from other articles I’ve had published. You can download my latest, January 2010 edition of Six Of The Best here, which includes these articles:

1. Do You Pass The Simplicity Test?
2. 8 Strategy Home Truths
3. Focus and Pace: Lessons From General Patton
4. Overcoming Your Internal Barriers To Growth
5. What’s The Breaking Point Of Your Business?
6. 10 Dimensions Of Great Customer Service

Enjoy!

© Stuart Cross 2010. All rights reserved.

Which of these approaches best describe how you work?

I don’t usually post quotes here, but this is an exception. I am grateful to Alan for making this quote available to me. It’s from the former US Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, John W. Gardner’s book, Excellence (first published in the 1960s) and will help shape my thinking from here on:

“We must learn to honor excellence in every socially-acceptable human activity—and to scorn shoddiness, however exalted the activity. An excellent plumber is infinitely more admirable than an incompetent philosopher. The society which scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity—and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity—will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.”

© Stuart Cross 2009. All Rights Reserved.