Strategy implementation, monitoring and control

Balanced Scorecard

- Acknowledges expectations of various stakeholders, uses a score card to measure results of the strategy - Balanced scorecard combines qualitative and quantitative elements - Translate the vision through gaining consensus - Communicating and linking, setting goals and rewarding - Business planning align objective, allocate resources and establish milestones - Feedback and learning, review performance against the plan - Financial perspective, translates purpose into action. What is our purpose how do we measure that in financial terms - Customer perspective, Purpose of organisation in context of customer orientated strategy, satisfaction and softer too not just satisfaction - Learning and growth relating to productivity within the company. - Innovation and learning, feedback and learning, sharing comments on outcome of events. Link people with the purpose of goal setting - Provides link between strategy and implementation.

Reaction to change

- At the beginning self esteem goes up, we cling onto what we are doing and trying to prove our own self worth - As we discard both things go down, as we adapt it goes up - Need to support at the discarding stage - If we know that employees will go through this then we should do something about it, empathy and emotional awareness will help make this move quicker - Better to realise that the reaction exists than try and ignore it and be annoyed when there is denial.

Levels of marketing control

- Business unit, is the strategy achieving units expected - Marketing mix, the 4 P's or C's achieving desired results, are price changes stimulating sales to desired degree - Product or line, Are our individual products performing as we want - Segment, What are the results for each customer - Geography, What are the results like for each branch or region - Manager, What is the status of each managers for sales results - Brand, Is each brand performing to pre set standards - Organisations in practice implement control in multiple levels, Zara control at consumer level, Unilever control at brand and further up.

Solutions to implementation issues

- Clear responsibility for successful outcome should be allocated - Need to limit the amount of strategies as there is only a degree of resources, can overlook that your resources might not match all your strategies - Planned, have to have specific actions, what takes place when etc - Implementation to be successful have to have milestones, measure effectiveness all the way along - If we have milestones, what are we measuring as we go along? - Style of strategic leadership, what kind of leader is best - Timing of when to act and when to make changes, danger of acting too quick and too slow. More important to be decisive, learn and adapt rather than wait for everything - Strategy that is at odds with culture is doomed from the beginning, making sure that business is done right in an honest and fair way.

Middle managers

- Crucial position - Knowledge managers - Key implementer - Inhibitors to change - Middle managers received bad press, stubborn defenders of status quo but this is changing

Colin Carnall's coping cycle

- Denial, people always deny change when they're faced with it. Eg oh do we really need this - Defence, when people understand its going to occur, rally against the change, hold onto the past and scared of the future - Discarding, people realise from previous situation, begin to move forward, gain new skills, discard old ways and embrace the new - Adaptation, finding a way to handle the change - Internalisation, convinced by change, has become the normal again - Some people can go from denial to internalisation very quick. - If implementation always involves change then the people involved are going to go through this cycle

Involvement

- Involving lower-level employees in strategic planning, lower down employees often received strategy with an air of distrust, lead over the years to get rid of middle levels of managing, flattening the corporate structure - Involving lower level staff leads to better implementation and better strategy overall, been with an organisation for several years.

Types of marketing control

- Look at overall effectiveness of the strategy - Annual allow to look at current strategy for next years plan. Feeds back into analysis for next year, gives strengths and weaknesses - Financial control, evaluate strategies interim and overall performance according to key financial measures eg cost sales profit etc - Productivity, evaluate the strategies performance relative to key processes and activities. Focuses on making improvement to the processes or activities that lower costs or increase output - Strategic control, used to assess performance in relation to social responsibility and ethics. Are our societal objective being set and achieved

Problems with implementation

- Matching strategy and structure. Have to match and be supportive of one another, smaller modifications might be more acceptable, ideally not chose strategy radically different to structure - Inadequate informations and communication. Information and communication systems can be inadequate, in this way the performance of the strategy is then not monitored properly and as a result control mechanisms might not be affective enough - Uncertainty and risk, implementing strategy involves change which in turn involves risk, may be more reluctant in practice to make changes, have to motivate and manage managers approach to change. - Management systems have to be developed to meet the needs of the strategy, make sure you are choosing strategy that match as much as you can assure success of the strategy. - Failure to predict time needed, eg time required for the product to take off, often expect more too quickly. Need to predict time into the implementation process - Other activities and commitments, have to be addressed too, ensure spare resources in case of an emergency. More difficult in practice than it might seem. - Space in which strategy was forecasted might change, insufficient flexibility to deal with this. - Assumes a well thought out strategy, if poorly thought out then the harder implementation becomes

Implementing Strategy

- Poor implementation. Planning = Waste of time and effort - To achieve results from strategy: Effective implementation, motivated managers, required resources

Planning for Marketing Control

- Set standard and measurement intervals, measure results, diagnose deviations, without control we won't be able to determine where or where things are falling short or exceeding or how we will move forward - Control allows to find warning signs - Carries ethical questions, will managers set lower goals so they can get bonuses and all that - Have to think ethically

Strategic management process

- Strategic implementation often considered one of the last elements but one of the most important - All the elements have to fit together in a seamless process - Have to take into account how you'll implement these strategies - This kind of analysis shows when and where performance isn't meeting the direction and highlighting marketing needs for control

Valuable contributions of middle managers

- The entrepreneur, value adding ideas, intrapreneurs - The therapist, stay in tune to emotional needs of the workforce, in tune with moods and emotions - The communicator, better than senior management at leveraging informal networks, excellent communicators, know people, good networks, able to gather the impetus needed to implement strategy well - The tightrope artist, Can manage the tension between continuity and change, keep organisation from falling to chaos and inertia

Building strategy from the middle

- Wanted to know if middle managers involvement improves performance - Improves decision making, cumulative creates a superior strategy, better performance - Improves performance by increasing consensus and agreement among lower-level staff, better implementation. Facilitates smooth implementation of strategy - A win win and a simple thing to undertake