Effective Strategic Alignment

The Importance of Alignment:
Organizations today are pursuing approaches to connect what is happening in their external environments (the organization landscape) and the impact on their capability to deliver products and services to customers. A key approach is to locate, identify hidden patterns and, tease out issues that impact successful direction and execution. Alignment is much more than documenting strategies, landscape trends or status of execution. It requires linking these movements together for a more reliable plan of execution.

Each organization is trying to find an advantage over its competitors, to improve operational performance or just to survive some rapid change in their environment. This explosion of interest in alignment poses a challenge to managers for effectively make sense of what the issues are and how effectively they manage transformation.

“The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence – it is to act with yesterday’s logic.” – Peter Drucker

What is going on outside the organization?
Alignment today is done piecemeal without linking the various organization structures and capabilities together for better insights. The linkage is important in responding to change and threats to survival. It is one thing to analyze customer preferences and behavior and another to assess the impact on strategy, tactics, and operations. The same thinking applies to technology change and operational changes but in reverse.

Change inside the organization and external to it must be assessed. An effective and productive manager should have the knowledge and skills to apply analytics using a systematic and structured method for alignment.

Proper selection of analysis methods verifies process correctness then applies techniques to identify the automation opportunities that lead to the yield that you want.

• Explain the different uses and value of alignment in strategic thinking today
• Use the alignment methods to improve organization effectiveness
• Understand the techniques used for the diverse types of alignment strategy analysis
• Describe how analytics provide capability to focus alignment insight
• Explain the technologies and tools available for assessing alignment
• Interpret how alignment methods can help management plan
• Select alignment techniques for that promote management productivity
• Understand the limits of alignment analytics
• Interpret and explain the value of end-to-end business alignment
• Suggest usage opportunities for alignment such as linking to management models such as SWOT, Balanced Scorecard, and others

Who should attend

Managers and professionals should prepare and assess coming changes. They should understand what to expect from applying alignment techniques. They should assess future trends and anticipate execution impact. This course is key for senior managers, strategic planners, marketing analysts, data analysts and architects, planning managers, process analysts.

Meet your expert course trainer: Frank Kowalkowski

Frank Kowalkowski is President of Knowledge Consultants, Inc., a firm focusing on business performance, business analytics, data science, business architecture, big data, business intelligence, predictive analytics and statistical techniques. He has over 30 years of line management and consulting experience in a wide variety of industries. He has been involved with many projects both as a user and purveyor of business analytics. He has worked projects in state and federal government dealing with back office operations, legislative compliance and regulatory compliance. He has worked on the federal level with the national defense department, Coast Guard for drug interdiction and other projects. His background includes a number of industries including manufacturing, distribution, supply chain, banking, insurance, financial institutions, health care, pharmaceuticals, oil and gas and chemicals.

More recently Frank has been involved in conducting workshops, professional training sessions and assessments of architecture, data science, governance, compliance, risk and process management efforts. He also develops algorithms for analytics tools particularly semantic algorithms as well as data analysis techniques. He is often a keynote speaker, panel moderator and member at international conferences as well as a conference chair, he has written numerous papers and spoken at conferences on a variety of business subjects. He conducts frequent seminars nationally and internationally on a variety of business management, analytics and information technology topics.

He is the author of a 1996 book on Enterprise Analysis. His most recent publications are a featured chapter in the business book “Digital Transformation: Using BPM You Already Own.” for publication in 2017. His chapter is titled “Improve, Automate, Digitize”, he also has a chapter in the business architecture book titled ‘Business and Dynamic Change’ June, 2015 and a chapter on semantic process analytics in the book Passports to Success in BPM published in 2014 all are available on Amazon.

Knowledge Consultants. Inc. (KCI)

Knowledge Consultants, Inc. is a professional services firm founded in 1984. KCI provides consulting and professional education services. With over 50 courses taught worldwide, KCI provides the opportunity to develop core strengths in the following certification areas:

• Process Management
• IT Management
• Business Performance Management
• Business Analysis
• Analytical Techniques for Business
• Business and IT Architecture

KCI has expanded its training and consulting efforts internationally into Europe, Southeast Asia and the Middle East. KCI has an outstanding list of current and past clients including many of the Fortune’s 100 companies.

Consulting focuses on the key areas of Business Performance Management, Process Management, Business and IT Architecture, Business Analysis, Using Analytic Techniques for Performance Improvement and IT Management.

Day One: The Value of Alignment

Organization alignment is about what structure you need for success considering the linkage alignment from external issues to execution. Alignment is a step beyond analysis of financials or quantitative factors. Those are used to help identify the purpose of alignment such as improving profits or increasing the number of products or creating a higher quality service.

Section 1:  The Value of Organizational Alignment

• What is alignment?
• Why is it important
• The value proposition of alignment
• Management productivity and value
• Managing the scope of alignment
• Video and Discussion – What is Alignment?

Section 2:  Defining Each Perspective

• Why four perspectives?
• The external landscape – what is impacting the organization?
• The strategic view – what direction should we take?
• The Tactical view – what structure works?
• Operational perspective – how do we deliver results?
• Gathering alignment data
• Demo and Discussion – Defining Perspectives

Section 3:  Linking the Perspectives

• What do we mean by linkage?
• How does it work?
• The value of linkage
• Good places to start alignment
• Exercise – Listing External Influences

Day Two: Connecting the Organization Landscape to strategy

Describing, linking, and analyzing the external and strategic perspective has value in setting the direction of the organization that drives tactics and execution. Management must integrate what is going on in the landscape with what strategies and objectives are needed to drive the organization forward. Linking these two perspectives is the starting point for this effort.

Section 4:  The organization landscape – Evaluating external influences

• Key issues with strategy alignment
• The four organizational perspectives for alignment:
• What are external influences?
• Using PESTLE-MB to identify influences
• Describing the impact of external influences
• Demo and Discussion – Ranking External Influences

Section 5:  Setting Direction – The strategic view

• What defines the strategic perspective?
• What core strategic components should you use?
• Strategies, goals, objectives, initiatives, innovations, risks, opportunities
• The role of management models like:
• Balanced scorecard, value chain, red/blue ocean etc.
• Describing the impact and value of the strategic perspective
• Ranking strategic options with risk/yield factors
• Demonstration – Strategic Risk Assessment

Section 6:  Aligning strategies with the landscape

• How do you link external influences with strategies?
• Where do AI and machine learning fit?
• What outcome are you looking for with his linkage?
• Inferencing impact
• Finding hidden impacts
• Focusing on potential high impact linkages
• Interactive Demonstration – Strategic Impact Analysis

Day Three: Connecting Strategy to Tactics- Organizational Impact

Tactics has not been a focus of current automation and improvement efforts especially as regards leveraging middle management. So, this is a rich opportunity for improvement especially as it deals with making decisions. The second alignment stage links the strategic perspective with the tactical perspective. There is a limited amount of material available for the analysis of organization tactics so the analysis effort may contain initial investigation and definition

Section 7:  Preparing the Strategic Perspective for Linkage

• Using material from landscape to strategy
• Original sourcing of strategy material
• Applying strategic analytics
• Interpreting the analytic results
• Decisions from strategy
• Interactive Demonstration – Strategic Analytics

Section 8:  Preparing the Tactical Perspective

• Identifying tactical categories for analysis
• Sourcing tactical material
• Applying analytics to tactical material
• Filtering and focusing on organization need
• Tactical decision making
• Exercise – Tactical Alignment Categories

Section 9:  Linking the Perspectives

• Filtering Strategic material
• Filtering Tactical material
• Defining the linkage approach
• Planning the linkage relationships
• Interpreting the results
• Interactive Demonstration and Discussion – A Linkage Analysis

Day Four: Aligning Tactics with execution

Operations are the major focus of automation and improvement efforts. Especially when interest is in hyper automation and management productivity. There is a wealth of material creating an issue of filtering alignment material. The third stage links the tactical perspective with the operational perspective. Unique analytics provide for filtering to a sharp focus on improvement opportunities.
Section 10:  The Tactical Perspective

• Using pre-defined tactical categories
• Sourcing new tactical material
• Applying select analytics to tactical material
• Filtering tactics and focusing on organization needs
• Tactical ranking for impact and priority
• Demo & Discussion – Tactical Ranking for Priority

Section 11: Operations – The Edge of the Organization – Delivering value to customers

• The edge of the organization, where the customers are
• What should you know about them?
• Selecting operational categories
• Applying analytics to execution
• Neural nets and execution performance
• Statistical techniques
• Machine learning
• Exercise – Selecting Operational Categories

Section 12:  Linking Tactics and Operations

• Filtering tactical categories
• Filtering operational categories
• Capabilities, values streams, organizations, locations
• Preparing a linkage relationship matrix
• Example – Consolidating organizations
• Impact analysis with AI
• Demo & Discussion – Using Neural Nets to assess process performance

Day Five: Connecting the Dots – End to End Alignment

Eventually an organization must be able to trace changes from top to bottom and back. The degree of detail and scope depend on the change situation. The cost of doing alignment follows the scope. Alignment is designed as an incremental approach. As a result, incremental accumulation of value is achieved over time. The overall framework ties the parts together. Hence the cost can be spread over time and updated as needed when change situations call for it. When all parts are executed, it is called end-to-end alignment.
Section 13:  Putting it all together – End to End alignment

• The idea of end-to-end landscape to operations alignment
• Strategy to execution alignment
• Identifying key linkages
• Focusing on improvement opportunities
• The key outcomes from strategy to execution alignment
• Demonstration – Strategy to execution impact analysis

Section 14: Analytics Linking Multiple Perspectives

• What is multi – stage linkage?
• Filtering for results
• Two stage linkage example
• Three stage linkage example
• Four stage linkage – the end-to-end approach
• Exercise – Which Linkage is most important?

Section 15:  At the End of the Day what do you Have?

• Revisiting the purpose and goal of alignment
• Interpreting the results of alignment
• Thinking about the future
• Defining future states of the organization
• Comparing As-Is with To Be structures
• Questions and Wrap