Strategy Workflow

Step by step process to develop strategy

A facilitator

"..is a person who helps a group of people to work together, better understand common objectives, and plan how to achieve these objectives, during meetings or discussions. Facilitator remains "neutral", meaning they do not take a particular position in the discussion

Following are the guidelines for Strategy Facilitator:

A. Meet Strategy Owner

A1. Ensure you are officially assigned as the facilitator of the strategy

A2. Request a meeting with strategy owner (the accountable person). In the meeting

a. Discuss the Scope e.g. corporate, line of business, support function or a capability

b. Discuss and identify key concerns of owner. Prepare a list of questions.

c. Discuss a list of stakeholders (responsible, consulted and informed persons) with strategy owner who will participate in the process. Only these persons will have access to the strategy in the system.

d. Identify the members of steering committee who will provide support, advise, guidance and approvals

B. Meet Stakeholders

B1. Request access to parent strategy, if any, and study it. You need to ensure alignment with parent strategy. Include the facilitator of parent strategy in the list of stakeholders

B2. Meet and capture concerns of all stakeholders, particularly those with significant influence and impact (prepare a stakeholder map for this purpose)

B3. Do your own research on the subject and discuss with SMEs in the consulted stakeholder list, if any

C. Diagnosis and Guiding Policies

C1. Define key business terms (glossary) related to the strategy

C2. Discover and analyze key disruptions from stakeholder concerns and perform diagnosis to discover strategic choices

C3. Conduct a stakeholder meeting and discuss the strategic choices to select the best options based on a list of decision criteria

C4. In the light of choices made, define the guiding policies

D. Define Action

D1. Identify Themes to group goals, outcomes and initiatives

D2. Document goals, outcomes and initiatives and discuss with their owners

D3. Link themes to business capabilities, risks and issues. Collaborate with owners of business capabilities, risk and issues catalog

E. Link Capabilities

E1. Collaborate with IT architects to link business capabilities to applications, data, processes, partnerships etc

E2. Establish provider and consumer relationship between capabilities

F. Updates

F1. Conduct frequent review sessions with stakeholders to ensure their participation and consensus

F2. Keep the strategy status updated: Draft, In Progress, Under Review, Approved, Archived

F3. Keep the Strategy log updated with comments, review, minutes

F4. Frequently review discussion section to answer comments from stakeholders