Values That Make Strategy Execution Agile

One of the questions being asked about our book Agile Strategy Execution: Revolutionizing the HOW!, is a desire to better understand what it is about the Agile Strategy Execution Framework (ASEF) that makes it agile. As mentioned in previous posts, I have defined Agile Strategy Execution to mean “translating strategy into a reality that is aligned, accountable and responsive.”
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• ALIGNED REALITY is an organizational or team environment where all components of strategy (goals and objectives, strategic priorities, and initiative investment portfolios) are cross-functionally linked and coordinated vertically and horizontally.​
• ACCOUNTABLE REALITY is an organizational or team environment where all employees are involved, engaged and committed with direct and visible line of sight to goals and strategy. They can see clearly the organizational interconnectedness as well as their role and value contribution.

• RESPONSIVE REALITY is an organizational or team environment where the corporate culture and organizational governance processes support ongoing adaptation and realignment to evolving and changing internal and external landscapes.

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​In other words, Agile Strategy Execution delivers timely value in an aligned, accountable and responsive way that contributes to the achievement of identified goals or business outcomes. These include growing revenue, improving margins enabling more effective internal efficiency and effectiveness, strengthening customer or partner Net Promoter Scores/satisfaction/loyalty, reducing risk or driving competitive advantage.
 
As everyone who has any connection to software development knows, this idea of enabling execution agility is not exactly new. For the last 15+ years the Agile Manifesto has been a key driver behind enabling a software development process that is more responsive to change.  In other words, systems/IT departments are better aligned and responsive and accountable to business user needs as they evolve, or in some cases transform, in response to market and customer landscape changes.
 
So as to make strategy execution agile, we have integrated a number of important ‘Agile Concepts with Strategic Planning ‘Best Practices’ and created a set of strategy execution themes that value:

• Individuals and collaboration especially cross-functional and even multi-enterprise interconnectivity (i.e with customers, suppliers, partners, and Alliances.)
• Self-organizing, self-managing and sustainable teams that are focused on projects, programs, Run-the-Business activities & process improvement work efforts (i.e. managing from middle rather than top-down.
• Continuous delivery or incremental improvements based on knowledge transfer, a learning culture and a bias for action. (i.e actionable intelligence)
• Results and the ability to drive course corrections when results deviate from expected tolerances. (i.e. metrics, targets and agreed upon variance thresholds)
• Real-time innovation in the way organizations respond, adjust, test, evolve and change with Scrum as a mechanism for getting things done quickly.
• Transparency and a single-source-of-truth for all information seeded from disparate data sources and applications.
• Backlog as a place to capture areas of needed work, execution alternatives or user stories outside the immediate need with sophisticated processes to re-prioritize the ‘backlog’ as needs change.  

​​These strategy execution themes provide the underlying philosophical foundation for the Agile Strategy Execution Framework Dimensions and Influencing Factors and are fundamental to organizational evolution up the Agile Strategy Execution Maturity Curve.