Connected Planning

A Playbook for Agile Decision Making

Ron Dimon

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781119485797
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Information Management
• Index: Business

Ron Dimon's thought-leading second edition of the book originally entitled Enterprise Performance Management Done Right, published in 2012, is a practical roadmap for using Connected Planning to develop an agile organization and to navigate the complex Enterprise Performance Management landscape.

According to esteemed author, researcher, and Management professor Dr. Christopher Neck, "In the same way that one needs to be self-leading to finish a grueling marathon, an organization must be self-leading in order to execute on its plans in an efficient and effective manner. What drives self-leadership at all levels in an organization? The people within the organization of course—and those people must be involved in the planning occurring in an organization. Without a plan, an organization has no direction."

Since 2012, much has changed in the world of connecting strategy with improved performance: new, cloud-based, in-memory technologies have been adopted by the largest organizations in the world. This book is for CFOs, CIOs, their direct reports, and any organizational visionary or aspiring leader who wants to ''bring it all together'' and create an actionable vision and plan for improving readiness, resilience, and performance.

CHAPTER 1
What's Broken and What's Possible?

“Finding what's wrong and fixing it” versus “seeing what's possible and going for it” give two very different lives.

—TONY MAYO

We are in the middle of an information deluge and an insight glut.¹

Our systems, processes, and information are still struggling to escape silos when the economy is crying out for collaboration, efficiency, and better results.

Folks are constantly reinventing the wheel at work and some lament “if only people in our company knew what everyone in our company knows!”² Many companies can barely agree on the definition of a customer, an employee, or sales figures, let alone agree on how to improve them.

With all this technology and information at our fingertips, we are still making decisions in the dark and relying on our best guesses.

Certainly, some organizations are doing better than others when it comes to closed-loop, fact-based decision-making, but the opportunity to take advantage of all this data we have is barely being exploited.

Strategy-Execution Gap

What is it that thwarts a rigorous process of sustainably executing an organization's strategy? As shown in Figure 1.1, some of the barriers include those capabilities that are the responsibility of managers and leaders in the organization.

In March 2010, Harvard Business Review (HBR) surveyed 1,075 HBR readers about strategy and execution in their organizations.³ Only 37% said their companies are “very good” or “excellent” at execution.

Figure 1.1 Barriers in the Strategy-Execution Gap

The HBR survey found that the top barriers to strategy-execution were:

• Making the strategy meaningful to frontline employees
• Poor communication of strategy
• Lack of accountability
• Lack of clear and decisive leadership
• Too much focus on short-term results
• Everyone too busy/not enough resources
• Resistance to change
• Strategy goals remain vague and pointless:
  • Leadership actions inconsistent with strategy
  • Inability to measure impact
  • Business units with competing agendas
  • Too much uncertainty

In my consulting work, and being an employee for small, medium, and large organizations, I've seen some of the barriers to effective strategy execution, including:

• No vetting of the strategy to see if it's actually doable (do we have the right capital, right products, right markets, right people?), and little debate to refine the strategy.
• Low agreement on what the strategy actually is—even among the C-suite executives (it's always a surprise to see this).
• Low connection between the strategic financial and operational business models (made in the vetting debate) and budgets, plans, and forecasts.
• Low buy-in to the budgets, plans, and forecasts (usually due to management overrides after a bottoms-up exercise), resulting in low buy-in to the strategy from lower levels in the organization.
• Low agreement on what the right measures are to see how well we're doing, and no visible connection between those measures and strategic objectives.
• Low belief that the numbers seen are accurate (or at least the same version), as well as a lot of manual effort to get at the numbers.
• Low understanding of the root causes as to why the company achieves, underachieves, or overachieves results.
• Little connection between root-cause analysis and tweaking the strategy (“hey, we are losing money on product X, and it's not a loss-leader, should we be in that business?”).
• Low accountability for results. Some organizations don't have targets or owners for their key objectives.

When it does work, I've seen things like accounts receivable associates having a Business Intelligence (BI) dashboard that shows how they have a daily impact on days sales outstanding and cash collections, which directly impacts strategic objectives like profitable revenue growth.

According to Roger Martin, Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, in his article “The Execution Trap,”⁴ as operational and frontline employees have to make decisions every day involving customers and operations, they become de facto strategists. Or, in my view, at least de facto strategy executioners, and I don't mean they have to kill the strategy!

Imagine if your number-one strategic objective is “profitable revenue growth,” and the target is 10% year-over-year improvement in both revenue and operating margin. Also imagine that every employee knows this—they even have it written on a laminated card they carry around in their wallets and purses. And then one of your customer service reps gets a phone call from an irate customer. Typically, the customer service rep is measured on customer satisfaction including low call time, low time-to-resolution, high marks on the net promoter score scale for each interaction, and so on. But what if the phone call from the irate customer was accompanied by a dashboard that automatically popped up on the customer service rep's screen that showed:

• Customer lifetime value (CLV) (how muc...