Strategy Execution vs. Performance Management: What You Need Software To Do (Part 9: A Platform for Results)

Time for another installment in my long series on this topic. For those of you who haven't been following this thread, here's a quick recap. In my first post Strategy Execution vs. Performance Management, I explained my basic premise that there are major differences between Strategy Execution software and the broader category of Performance Management software and why I believe that only Strategy Execution software really helps an organization become more performance-focused. I've since talked about accountability (Part 2), driving action (Part 3), performance improvement (Part 4), communication (part 5), data (part 6), who should manage this software in your organization (part 7), and distributed management (part 8). Today, it's all about what features in Strategy Execution software will help you achieve results.

So far in this series, I’ve been arguing that technology is needed to support true Strategy Execution.  More specifically, software that clearly captures the objectives of the organization and cascades them down through multiple levels, helping you ensure that everything is aligned to achieve the results you want.  

Once an organization masters these simple, profound concepts (that are ironically difficult to practice), they end up wanting more. Lots more. Here are some things I’ve seen organizations want as they become more advanced:

• Support for six sigma methodologies. Control charts, control limit calculation, out of control condition alerting and stoplighting, graphical navigation of connected control charts.
• Strong support for linking personal goals to the organizational strategy. Support for not just business reviews, but also personal reviews. The ability to “cascade” some of a manager's goals to her direct reports. The ability to have common department or company goals. Easy linkage with a compensation system.
• Process Management and Improvement. Once an organization has tackled the top-down strategy approach, they find gaps in cross functional areas. Select a system that can manage processes as well. Support for process hierarchies, process maps, and the ability to link measures and initiatives to the process are all important here.
• The ability to benchmark against internal and external best practices examples.
• The ability to support communities of practice or special interest groups to share best practices.   

Our next post will wrap up this topic with some predictions of where this whole Performance Management / Strategy Execution area will head over the next few years. 

I’d love to hear your comments on this topic or any questions you may have about using software to drive your Strategy Execution efforts.

Comments

[Walter González]

Hi Jeff, I think that the best aproach to manage processes is to automate them in an independent Business Process Management Suite (BPMS) and then, this BPM software feed the related measure and initiative with automated data from BPM to ESE software. Of course this BPMS is out of scope of an ESE software, but it would be better than just to link to a library of processes. What do you think?