Executives and senior management

Executives continue to highlight the challenge of losing between 20% to 40% of the impact of their strategies.

Executive teams and senior management continue to search for new  methods for the effective  and agile execution of strategies in a business environment that continues to speed up and change. They require integrated thinking and toolsets to continue to align internal capabilities against this environment and design strategies that are executable. Such solutions must support the current organisational culture and best practise, such as the balanced scorecard or business modeling.

How openaxyz addresses executive team and senior management challenges:

Openaxyz addresses these executive requirements and enables agile execution that shows the impact of strategies to enable effective decision making.  It provides effective and reliable techniques for cascading strategic activities to the right levels of work and linking all the actions of all the people to the strategic goals.   At the same time openaxyz enables a “bubbling” of ideas from employees so that the executive team stays informed and gain new insights into customer needs, new potential opportunities and also understand the potential obstacles employees face in being able to do their work well.

It is intuitive and easy to understand and use and while people use this, they automatically start building skills in integrative thinking, cascading of goals, alignment, performance management, communication and collaboration.

The visual communication toolset also shows employees how their work contributes to the overall achievement of the strategic goals of their teams and ultimately the organization. They can therefore connect the dots between their performance and overall organizational performance.

Some of the areas that executives have applied openaxyz methods and toolsets are indicated below:

• Keep diverse role players and stakeholders focused on the executive agenda and executive strategy

• Develop agile strategic capability networks to increase competitive advantage

• Have a complete and transparent view of the enterprise on One Page

• Enable human capital strategies towards strategic performance

• Streamline, standardize and simplify the strategy execution processes as part of the cost savings and efficiency focus

• Integrative strategy planning and execution through a simple and effective cascading process

• Finance Excellence blueprints and scorecards linked to overall organizational strategies

• Integrated and cost effective financial risk and compliance management

• Embedding a culture of focusing on free cash flow while growing the business

• Align budget and strategy creating a logical stepped process to link strategic goals, activities required to implement and budgets

• Knowledge sharing and collaboration between subject matter experts in the finance function, ensuring effective utilisation of best practices across the function

• Implement a standardized approach to strategy and execution across the organization Vectorize business

• Drive for a discipline in execution

• Implement high stakes strategic initiatives demonstrating the value to the overall strategy

• Align diverse functions and business towards One Goal

• Build social collaboration and participation in strategy planning • Involve middle managers to secure commitment 

• Practical linking of operations to strategy to maintain a Strategy Focused organization, including effective cascading of balanced scorecards and other strategy execution approaches

• Developing a process centric view of strategy planning and execution to save costs, make it more effective and simplified

• Improve supply chain management by integrating business goals, such as sustainability strategies into procurement and sourcing including vendor performance management

• Visibly demonstrating the importance of the link between operations and sales to improve understanding between these two functions for improved collaboration and effective and credible delivery on the customer promise

• Structuring and managing of Centres of Excellence, Shared Services and Business Process Outsourcing activities

• Shaping the ICT strategy and focus maintaining a balance between current requirements and future trends

• Demonstrate the alignment of the ICT strategy and execution on organizational strategy

• Strategic Initiative management across organizational silos

• Implementing a solution that stimulates social business design and a collaboration culture in the CIO division which also includes outsourced business partners

• Transparency and visibility of integrated technology risk and compliance management in adherence to global risk requirements, such as the King III integrated reporting

• Making a visible and tangible business case for the marketing and sales strategies

• Alignment of the marketing sales strategies to overall organizational strategic intent and success

• Product strategy mapping against customers segments integrated with execution and performance management

• Strategic brand portfolio management and alignment with the internal culture and organizational DNA (effective collaboration with Human Capital)

• Customer segmentation and marketing communications including advertising and marketing campaign impact analysis

• Demonstrating a logical and visible contribution of Human Capital as a Strategic Business Partner

• Contribute to a lean organization structure – integrating people’s activities to right levels of work to optimize their capabilities and capacity to perform

• Focused initiative portfolio and human resources scorecard linked to the strategic objectives

• Organizational Development capability: Strategy execution – a key role of the HR Strategic Business Partner using a collaborative and logical approach that includes people at different levels in the organization

• Ability of human capital professionals to work across organizational silos and measure the performance of such collaboration

• Apply integrative thinking into sustainability and strategy and demonstrate how easy it is to turn sustainability into a strategic differentiator

• Integrate initiatives towards focus and high impact outcomes, balancing long term and short term goals

• Introduce a more systematic pro-active approach to make tangible the intangible and create a green brand

• Integrate, consolidate and align corporate social responsibility, sustainable and internal initiatives such as employee wellness programs

• Allow diverse stakeholders to participate and create visibility of sustainability initiatives