Is Your Strategy Ready for Tomorrow?

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Benefits Realization   Decision Making   Strategy  

Many organizations have made significant progress in their strategic planning and delivery in recent years. Annual planning cycles, combined with sales pitch-style project proposals, have been replaced by continuous and adaptive planning with investments driven directly from established strategic priorities. However, the priorities and investments are still largely intended to achieve performance targets within the next business cycle.

Call them OKRs, KPIs, or something else—the organization establishes a performance level that it wants to achieve by a target date, and then determines the success of the investment based on performance against that target. Never mind that in many cases those performance measurements are perfunctory at best; if they’re not achieved, then the project hasn’t been as successful as it should have been.

In recent years, some goals and objectives have been extended in time—revenue targets for the first two years or market share by the end of year three, for examples. But in virtually all cases these are extended objectives; they’re not the only ones. Even if that three-year market share goal is the most important, there are more immediate objectives put in place to measure market share in a shorter time horizon—to consider unit sales in the first x quarters, for example.

There’s a logic here—these interim measures provide milestones that are …

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