As the introduction to this blog notes, Tom Peters has said that “organizations are swarms of teams” focused on building new products, improving business processes, defining and meeting customer requirements, and essentially engaged in turning strategies into action and results. While nearly every organization has a strategy, very few organizations have a comprehensive view of how to execute that strategy and ensure that their critical initiatives consistently deliver value. For most organizations, turning strategy into effective action is an art – vision and mission statements, annual and capital budgets, key performance indicators, and a range of execution approaches all play a role, but the specific relationships between these systems and the actual results that they deliver are frequently mysterious – distributed across the organization, hidden on desktops and in department level tools, or held in the heads of key employees.
Turning Strategies and Critical Initiatives into action is the core challenge of top managers everywhere. The advent of new approaches and tools has raised the bar for organizations of all sizes to build execution as a core competence and to ensure that their critical initiatives are delivering results and driving shareholder value. The tools and approaches of effective performance improvement are rarely, in most organizations, documented, trainable, closely managed or continuously improved.
Kaplan and Norton of Balnaced Scorecard fame have identified the need for an organization to build this bridge between strategic coals and action as the "Strategic Management Office" or SMO. But many organizations will find it easier to re-tool their IT or Operational PMOs to fill this role than to create an overlapping organization from scratch.
The bottom line: Strategy execution won't happen well until it is someone's job. The PMO team in many corporations is in a great position to prove its value by reaching out and grabbing this responsibility as rightfully theirs
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