Initiative Management

The Challenge

How many initiatives are currently underway in your organization? 20? 30? Most CEOs underestimate the number. When we inventory initiatives, we typically uncover upwards of 100. At one of our larger clients, we stopped counting at 1,100 active initiatives.

These inventories typically uncover projects lacking clear objectives, deadlines, milestones, or measures. Yet these “above-and-beyond your day job” activities absorb the time and energy of your most sought-after employees.

Why isn't the value of your people's time being managed with the same rigor you apply to external capital ?

Consider how carefully you track external spending. In most companies, a dollar isn’t paid to an outside vendor without having gone through a careful budgeting process and oversight from procurement. Yet the time employees spend on untracked internal initiatives could be costing you as much or more than your external spending. Why isn’t the value of your people’s time being managed with the same rigor you apply to external capital?

How Strategic Offsites Can Help

Through years of experience, we’ve developed a process to help clients manage and rationalize initiatives. We’ll tailor the details to meet your specific needs, but the core of these projects remains the same: senior team alignment through shared understanding and a fair and open process.

The result is a portfolio of initiatives closely aligned to your organization's strategic objectives

We first inventory initiatives currently underway by gathering basic survey data on each, “turning over rocks” several times to uncover as many as we can. We collect data on them to ensure your management team has a basic understanding of each. Your team then prioritizes the initiatives relative to each other in terms of impact, urgency, resources deployed, and other relevant measures. Once your priorities are clear, we help put in place a mechanism for your senior team to track progress by documenting metrics, milestones, and other clear benchmarks for each.

The result is a set of initiatives closely aligned to your organization’s strategic objectives, a senior management team with collective accountability for their success, and an ability to articulate the rationale for their decisions to the organization. This high-level management of a portfolio of strategic initiatives provides the critical bridge between a team setting a strategy and seeing it through to successful execution.