Your Strategy Needs an Implementation Strategy

Irfan Shariff is an expert project manager with a passion for delivering exceptional results for his clients. He is passionate about driving the utilization of project management in its entirety in organizations so that they can repeatedly deliver exceptional value to their stakeholders in the most effective and efficient way. He can be reached at [email protected].

  Governance   PMO   Strategy  

With The Economist’s trademark clarity, the Economist Intelligence Unit’s study Why Good Strategies Fail: Lessons for the C-suite (sponsored by PMI) highlights the implementation gap that contributes to the failure of good strategies.

Among the reasons contributing to the implementation gap: the conceptual nature of strategy formulation; the organizational distance that separates strategy formulation (which happens typically at the executive level) and strategy implementation (which happens at the operational level); and the surprisingly prevalent belief that good strategy would just work[i].

While these reasons contribute to the implementation gap, they aren’t the root cause. The root cause is that most organizations don’t have actionable strategies for implementing strategy[ii]. The ones that have performed above average in strategy implementation, which the study calls “executors”, have found that “Success results from working at implementation in a variety of ways, but the financial rewards justify the effort.”[iii]

The EIU study confirms that these “executors” use a variety of implementation strategies to implement strategy or strategic initiatives[iv]. The availability and use of the multiple implementation strategies is further confirmed by PMI’s Pulse of the Profession PMO Frameworks report…

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