Achieve Strategy Alignment the Right Way
By Jibility Co-Founder Chuen Seet
Strategy Alignment: The Key to Business Success
Strategy alignment refers to the process of ensuring that all aspects of a business, from its goals and objectives to its daily operations, are aligned with its overall strategy.
When your business operates in alignment with its strategy, you are better positioned to achieve its strategic goals. However, aligning your organization can be a challenging process, especially for organizations that are complex and have multiple moving parts.
Fortunately, Jibility’s unique method can help you ensure that your business operations are aligned to achieve your strategic vision. Our unique methodology is made up of the Jibility Steps, created by expert strategy consultants to guide Jibility users through the whole process of creating a strategic roadmap that keeps you, your team, and your organization aligned with your strategy.
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Step 1: Define your Business Goals
The first step in achieving strategic alignment is to define your business’ goals, in order to do this, you or the leadership team within your organization will need to (if you haven’t already), articulate what aspirational goals your business should be working towards achieving. In order to define these goals, you may conduct a SWOT analysis, or explore your organization’s vision and/or mission. Explore strategic goal setting with some examples here.
Step 2: Determine the Challenges
Every goal will have challenges along the way, understanding what those challenges may be is integral to increasing the likelihood of successfully achieving the goals that will bring your strategic vision to life.
Step 3: Outline Your Business Objectives
You will also need to set objectives to help you determine if you are overcoming your challenges and achieving your goals. Depending on how complex your goals and challenges are you may need to set a series of objectives against each goal. Whatever objectives you set should be specific, measurable and time-bound.
Step 4: Identify your Business’s Strategy
Once you have defined your objectives, the next step is to identify your strategy to achieve them. The strategy should consider your organization’s capabilities. This approach is called capability-based planning and it is a powerful technique used by enterprise architects around the world to ensure any business has the right capability mix to achieve its strategic vision. Find out more about capability-based planning here.
Step 5: Align the Business’s Operations with its Strategy
The third step in achieving strategy alignment is to align your operations with your strategy. This involves ensuring that your business’s day-to-day activities and processes support its overall strategy and contribute to the achievement of your objectives.
To conduct this level of detailed analysis, you may choose to employ a series of implementation plans. You can read up about creating an effective implementation plan here.
Step 6: Monitor and Adjust the Business’s Strategy
The fourth step in achieving strategy alignment is to monitor and adjust the business strategy. This involves regularly assessing the business’s progress and making any necessary changes to your strategic approach to ensure that your team continues to achieve your objectives. To be able to monitor your progress you will need robust reporting systems that are leveraged regularly.
Step 7: Communicate the Business’s Strategy to all Stakeholders
This involves ensuring that everyone who is involved with the business, understands the business’s goals and the overall strategy to achieve them. This is important because it helps to ensure that everyone is working towards the same objectives and that the business’s strategy is being implemented effectively.
Gaining stakeholder buy-in can be challenging, and can slow down your big plans! Read our article on how to get stakeholder buy-in for your strategic initiatives here.
Step 8: Review and Refine the Business’s Strategy Regularly
Don’t think that your strategy is a static document! Regularly assess your progress and make any necessary changes to your strategy to ensure that it continues to align with your objectives. This is an ongoing process; you will need to be agile and innovative if you want to continue to meet the changing needs of the business and its stakeholders.
Strategy alignment is one of the most critical and difficult things for any organization to achieve. Ensuring alignment to bring your strategic vision to life is a common challenge faced by a lot of organizations around the globe.
Jibility was created by strategy execution experts who recognized just how challenging achieving strategic alignment can be. When you develop your strategic roadmap in Jibility, you gain access to Jibility’s unique six-step methodology, with guided capability-based planning.
If you are ready to close the strategy-execution gap at your organization, try Jibility for free today!!
Don’t Make These Common Strategy Alignment Mistakes
Strategy alignment is a critical component of business success, but it’s not without its challenges. To avoid common mistakes, consider the following:
Lack of clear objectives: Without clear objectives, it is difficult to align your strategy with your business. Make sure that yourobjectives are well-defined and aligned with your overall vision and mission.
Failing to involve all stakeholders: Involving all stakeholders in the strategy alignment process is essential for ensuring buy-in and support. Make sure that everyone understands their role in achieving each objective.
Ignoring market changes: The business environment is constantly changing, so it is important to regularly monitor market trends and adjust your strategy as necessary. Failing to respond to market changes can result in missed opportunities and decreased competitiveness.
Not allocating resources effectively: To achieve your objectives, it is important to allocate resources effectively. Make sure that resources are being used in the most efficient and effective way possible to support the strategy.
Lack of regular communication and monitoring: Regular communication and monitoring are critical for ensuring that the strategy is aligned with the business. Make sure that everyone is on the same page and that progress is regularly reviewed and refined.
Failing to review and refine the strategy: The strategy should be regularly reviewed and refined to ensure that it remains aligned with the business and responsive to changes in the market.
Stratgy Alignment FAQs
How do you align a strategy?
Aligning a strategy involves several steps:
1. Define clear goals for the business.
2. Outline objectives used to measure the attainment of those goals.
3. Identify your current strategy.
4. Align operations with the strategy.
5. Monitor progress.
6. Communicate the strategy to stakeholders.
7. Regularly review and refine the strategy.
Why strategic alignment is important
Strategic alignment is important in ensuring all aspects of your business are working toward the same goals. When your organization is aligned with its strategic vision, it will be able to reduce waste, increase efficiencies, and move nimbly in a constantly changing business environment, while bringing its strategic vision to life. Achieving strategic alignment is a challenging and ongoing process. Jibility helps businesses across the world create strategic roadmaps that are qualified and designed to bring any strategic vision to life.
What does strategic alignment mean?
Strategic alignment refers to the process of aligning a company’s strategy with its overall goals, vision and/or mission. It ensures that all aspects of the business work together towards the same goals, and helps to minimize conflicts and redundancies. Strategic alignment is essential for businesses to achieve long-term success and stay competitive in a rapidly changing business environment.