Scenario
A global shipping company had launched its new strategy three years before. After successfully implementing the first two stages, the next step was to implement process excellence. Its leaders adopted a combination of the latest thinking from Six Sigma, lean manufacturing and other quality initiatives.
As part of the game plan, each country would roll out the process excellence. The key challenge was to ensure staff members adhered to the game plan and that ultimately customers would experience the impact from the process improvements.
Approach Adopted
To ensure this would happen, the company adopted Strategy Implementation Reviews (SIRs). These reviews, which were held once a month for a maximum of two hours, sought answers to the following critical questions:
What are the deliverables?
What has changed in the strategic landscape?
Are we achieving the Critical Success Factors?
What lessons have we learned from both the successes and failures?
What is our next step?
After each meeting, the implementation was adjusted and the results tracked. Most importantly the reviews kept the strategy on the leadership’s radar. In addition the leaders followed up on action items as they knew they were going to have to answer on them and the strategy was adjusted when it was discovered that what seemed good in the board room discussions was not working for the customers as planned.
