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.
Step 1: Define your Business Goals
The first step in achieving strategic alignment is to define your business’s goals. To do this, you or the leadership team must articulate the aspirational goals your business should be working towards. To define these goals, you may conduct a SWOT analysis, or explore your organization’s vision and/or mission.
Step 2: Determine the Challenges
Every goal will have its challenges. Understanding those challenges is integral to increasing the likelihood of successfully achieving the goals that will bring your strategic vision to life. Keep in mind that determining your challenges can also include identifying your opportunities.
Step 3: Outline Your Business Objectives
Set objectives to help 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, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.
Step 4: Strategize How to Achieve Your Objectives
Once you have defined your objectives, the next step is to consider how to achieve them. This involves analyzing 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.
Step 5: Align the Business’s Operations with its Strategy
To align day-to-day operations with the overall business strategy, an organization should start by clearly communicating the strategic objectives to all levels of the organization. This involves ensuring that employees understand the broader vision, goals, and desired outcomes.
It is crucial to establish a framework that connects strategic objectives with specific operational activities, such as setting departmental goals and KPIs that directly contribute to the strategic objectives.
Step 6: Monitor and Adjust the Business’s Strategy
Regular monitoring and review of progress should be implemented to track alignment and make necessary adjustments. To monitor your progress, you will need robust reporting systems that are leveraged regularly.
Step 7: Communicate the Business’s Strategy to all Stakeholders
Ensure that all stakeholders understand the business’s goals and the overall strategy to achieve them. Never take it for granted that everyone is on the same page.
Additionally, fostering a culture of collaboration, communication, and empowerment throughout the organization can help employees understand how their individual roles and tasks contribute to the larger strategic goals, promoting a sense of ownership and commitment to the alignment process.
Step 8: Review and Refine the Business’s Strategy Regularly
A strategy is never truly done and dusted. Strategic planning 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 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.
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 your objectives 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 carefully. This is where capability-based planning can have a major impact, by helping you focus on the right areas for allocating resources.
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.
Strategy Alignment FAQs
How do you align a strategy?
Aligning a strategy involves several steps:
1. Define clear goals for the business
2. Articulate your challenges in achieving these goals
3. Outline objectives used to measure the attainment of those goals
4. Analyze how you can best achieve these objectives
5. Align operations with the strategy
6. Monitor progress
7. Communicate the strategy to stakeholders
8. Regularly review and refine the strategy
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.
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.