How to change the strategic planning process into an empowering management tool?
On the starting line:
«From this strategic planning process, please make a great management tool.»
This was the unexpected request of the CEO of the French subsidiary of a Transport and Logistic group. He had been required by the Group to implement throughout France a new corporate process for strategic planning, called “Balanced Scorecard”
We took the bull by the horns: How could we use this project as an empowering management experience, rather than “one more corporate reporting project”? How could we use this project to develop a corporate understanding of the strategy, to design and roll-out consistent strategies in each of the 40 French agencies, during the next five years, thus mobilising collaborative intelligence?
The steps along the path:
• Slice the activity into sub-processes, so that everyone can focus on his business, his responsibilities, his issues
• Mobilise teams and organise workshops to identify contributions, responsibilities and KPIs for each sub-process
• Monitor the production of the various workshops designing the BalancedScorecard
• Design the method to roll-out the resulting Balanced Scorecard
• Train the region’s directors to roll-out the BSC locally: master the methodology, define the deliverables, propose work methods, understand their animation role.
Key factors for success:
• A tight collaboration with the corporate leader of the Balanced Scorecard Project, ensuring consistency of goal and methodology
• A deep dive into the methodology, so that contributors share and master every step of it
• At each step, lessons learnt are turned into actions to be implemented on the short term, at the shop floor level - which keeps the momentum going during the project
• Ensure effective support by managers and opinion leaders
• Design tools to monitor the workshops’ production and make it more effective
On the finishing line:
• The vision, the objectives, the actions and the strategic KPIs are a business reality within the whole network.
• The integration into the budget process ensures that the transformation perspectives are meaningful, consistent and realistic.
• This new lever of mobilisation finds its peak at the annual convention with the Balanced Scorecard trophy
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