2. STRATEGY OF IMPLEMENTATION
Implementation is the process that turns strategies
and plans into actions in order to accomplish strategic
objectives and goals.
A good strategy without proper
implementation is like a poor
strategy or no strategy at all
3. STRATEGY OF IMPLEMENTATION
Getting Your Strategy Ready for Implementation
The strategic plan addresses the what and why of
activities, but implementation addresses the who,
where, when, and how.
4. STRATEGY OF IMPLEMENTATION
Avoiding the Implementation pitfalls
• Lack of ownership:
• Lack of
communication:
• An overwhelming plan:
• A meaningless plan:
• Annual strategy:
• No progress report:
• No accountability:
• Lack of
empowerment:
5. STRATEGY OF IMPLEMENTATION
Covering all your bases
• How committed are you to implementing the plan to move your company
forward?
• How do you plan to communicate the plan throughout the company?
• Are there sufficient people who have a buy-in to drive the plan forward?
• Are you going to commit money, resources, and time to support the plan?
• How will you take available resources and achieve maximum results with
them?
Before you start, evaluate your strategic plan and how you may
implement it by answering a few questions to keep yourself in check.
6. STRATEGY OF IMPLEMENTATION
Making sure you have the support
Often overlooked are the five key components
necessary to support implementation: people,
resources, structure, systems, and culture.
8. STRATEGY OF IMPLEMENTATION
Making sure you have the support
Resources- You need to have sufficient funds and enough time to
support implementation.
Structure- Set your structure of management and appropriate lines of
authority, and have clear, open lines of communication with your
employees.
Systems - build milestones into the plan that must be achieved within a
specific time frame.
Culture - Create an environment that connects employees to the
organization’s mission and that makes them feel comfortable.
9. STRATEGY OF IMPLEMENTATION
Determine your plan of attack
Implementing your plan includes several different
pieces. Implementing a plan can sometimes feel
like it needs another plan of its own.
10. STRATEGY OF IMPLEMENTATION
Determine your plan of attack
• Modify it to make it your own timeline and fit your
organization’s culture and structure.
• Establish your scorecard system for tracking and
monitoring your plan.
• Set up strategy meetings with established reporting to
monitor your progress.
11. MONITORING AND
EVALUATION
Monitoring and evaluation always relate to pre-identified results in the
development plan. monitoring provides real-time information on
ongoing programme or project implementation required by
management, evaluation provides more in-depth assessments.
12. Monitoring and Evaluation
1.What is to be monitored and evaluated
2.The activities needed to monitor and evaluate
3.Who is responsible for monitoring and evaluation
activities
4.When monitoring and evaluation activities are
planned (timing)
5.How monitoring and evaluation are carried out
(methods)
6.What resources are required and where they are
committed
13. Monitoring and Evaluation
Monitoring, as well as evaluation, provides
opportunities at regular predetermined points to
validate the logic of a programme, its activities and
their implementation and to make adjustments as
needed.
Progress towards achieving results needs to be monitored.
Information from monitoring needs to be
used to encourage improvements or
reinforce plans.
Information from systematic monitoring
also provides critical input to evaluation.
14. Monitoring and Evaluation
The key questions that monitoring seeks to answer include the
following:
• Are the preidentified outputs being produced as planned and
efficiently?
• What are the issues, risks and challenges that we face or foresee
that need to be taken into account to ensure the achievement of
results?
• What decisions need to be made concerning changes to the
already planned work in subsequent stages?
• Will the planned and delivered outputs continue to be relevant for
the achieve- ment of the envisioned outcomes?
• Are the outcomes we envisaged remaining relevant and effective
for achieving the overall national priorities, goals and impacts?
16. Monitoring and Evaluation
MONITORING APPROACH AND TOOLS
Those who manage programmes and projects must determine the
correct mix of monitoring tools and approaches for each project,
programme or outcome, ensuring that the monitoring contains an
appropriate balance between:
• Data and analysis—This entails obtaining and analysing
documentation from projects that provides information on
progress.
• Validation—This entails checking or verifying whether or not the
reported progress is accurate.
• Participation—This entails obtaining feedback from partners and
beneficiaries on progress and proposed actions.
17. Monitoring and Evaluation
Plan evaluation is a continuous activity which extends over
and beyond the entire period of plan implementation. It can
be done during and after implementation.
Like monitoring, evaluation is an
integral part of programme
management and a critical
management tool.
18. Features of a Plan Evaluation Process
A plan evaluation process should have relevance, credibility, timeliness
and efficiency.
1. Relevance – the plan evaluation process applies criteria valid for the
measurement of the plan’s objective.
2. Credibility - the same process is convincing and is not charged with
biases.
3. Timeliness – evaluation should continue throughout the
implementation of a plan, and its results should be available when
decisions have to be taken.
4. Efficiency – the evaluation should aim at minimizing its own cost and
maximizing its output.
19. Monitoring and Evaluation
Evaluation complements monitoring by providing an
independent and in-depth assessment of what worked
and what did not work, and why this was the case.
A quality evaluation provides feedback that can be
used to improve programming, policy and strategy.
Evaluation also identifies unintended results and
consequences of development initiatives, which may
not be obvious in regular monitoring as the latter
focuses on the implementation of the development
plan.
21. Monitoring and Evaluation
1: PRE-EVALUATION: INITIATING THE EVALUATION PROCESS
Checking the evaluability, or readiness, for evaluation
22. Monitoring and Evaluation
2. PREPARATION
Agreeing on the management structure of an evaluation and roles
and responsibilities
3: MANAGING THE CONDUCT OF THE EVALUATION
Briefing and supporting the evaluation team
4: USING THE EVALUATION—MANAGEMENT RESPONSE,
KNOWLEDGE SHARING AND DISSEMINATION
Preparing the management response for decentralized evaluations
Implementing your strategic plan is as important, or even more important, than your strategy.
roadmap THE needs to pursue a specific strategic direction and set of performance goals, deliver customer value, and be successful.
roadmap guarantees the traveler arrives at the desired destination.
For those businesses that have a plan in place, wasting time and energy on the planning process and then not implementing the plan is very discouraging.
The fact is that both are critical to success
In the following sections, you discover how to get support for your complete implementation plan and how to avoid some common mistakes.
Lack of ownership: The most common reason a plan fails is lack of ownership. If people don’t have a stake and responsibility in the plan, it’ll be business as usual for all but a frustrated few.
Lack of communication: The plan doesn’t get communicated to employees, and they don’t understand how they contribute.
Getting mired in the day-to-day: Owners and managers, consumed by daily operating problems, lose sight of long-term goals. _ Out of the ordinary: The plan is treated as something separate and removed from the management process.
An overwhelming plan: The goals and actions generated in the strategic planning session are too numerous because the team failed to make tough choices to eliminate non-critical actions. Employees don’t know where to begin.
A meaningless plan: The vision, mission, and value statements are viewed as fluff and not supported by actions or don’t have employee buy-in.
Annual strategy: Strategy is only discussed at yearly weekend retreats. _ Not considering implementation: Implementation isn’t discussed in the strategic planning process. The planning document is seen as an end in itself.
No progress report: There’s no method to track progress, and the plan only measures what’s easy, not what’s important. No one feels any forward momentum.
No accountability: Accountability and high visibility help drive change. This means that each measure, objective, data source, and initiative must have an owner.
Lack of empowerment: Although accountability may provide strong motivation for improving performance, employees must also have the authority, responsibility, and tools necessary to impact relevant measures. Otherwise, they may resist involvement and ownership. It’s easier to avoid pitfalls when they’re clearly identified. Now that you know what they are, you’re more likely to jump right over them!
You don’t need to have the perfect answers to all these questions right now, but just make sure that you’ve given all the questions equal consideration.
You don’t want to look back six months from now, and wish you had identified some big issues that are now threatening your success. If you’ve identified some red flags, assess if they’re huge obstacles or small ones. If they’re big, get them out of the way before you implement, even if it means pushing your timeline out for awhile.
The right people include those folks with required competencies and skills that are needed to support the plan. In the months following the planning process, expand employee skills through training, recruitment, or new hires to include new competencies required by the strategic plan.
. Often, true costs are underestimated or not identified. True costs can include a realistic time commitment from staff to achieve a goal, a clear identification of expenses associated with a tactic, or unexpected cost overruns by a vendor. Additionally, employees must have enough time to implement what may be additional activities that they aren’t currently performing.
A plan owner and regular strategy meetings are the two easiest ways to put a structure in place. Meetings to review the progress should be scheduled monthly or quarterly, depending on the level of activity and time frame of the plan.
Both management and technology systems help track the progress of the plan and make it faster to adapt to changes. As part of the system, build milestones into the plan that must be achieved within a specific time frame. A scorecard is one tool used by many organizations that incorporates progress tracking and milestones. See the section “Keeping Score of Your Progress” later in this chapter for info on how to create a scorecard for your company.
To reinforce the importance of focusing on strategy and vision, reward success. Develop some creative positive and negative consequences for achieving or not achieving the strategy. The rewards may be big or small, as long as they lift the strategy above the day-to-day so people make it a priority.
Implementing your plan includes several different pieces. Implementing a plan can sometimes feel like it needs another plan of its own. But you don’t need to go to that extent because I’ve done it for you! Use the steps below as your base implementation plan.
it would be difficult to know whether the intended results are being achieved as planned what corrective action may be needed to ensure delivery of the intended results, and whether initiatives are making positive contributions towards human development.
, is essential in order to carry out monitoring and evaluation systematically
Good planning and designs alone do not ensure results. Progress towards achieving results ne
Equally, no amount of good monitoring alone will correct poor programme designs, plans and results.
eds to be monitored.
It is very difficult to evaluate a programme that is not well designed and that does not systematically monitor its progress
Have a clear common understanding of the following:
The monitoring policies applicable to the respective monitoring entity
Relevant roles and responsibilities and how they are applied in monitoring for both outcomes and outputs, and management entities in projects and programmes
Commonly used monitoring tools and approaches
Reinforce and elaborate the initial monitoring framework (described in Chapter 3) with detailed information needed to implement monitoring actions. This includes finalizing reference points for periodic monitoring such as indicators, baselines, risks, and annual targets, and locking them in monitoring information systems.
Implement monitoring actions: organize, plan and implement monitoring actions, using selected tools for collection and analysis of data and reporting.
Use monitoring data objectively for management action and decision making.
ffective monitoring generates a solid data base for evaluations. Data, reports, analysis and decisions based on monitoring evidence should be retained with a view to making them easily accessible to evaluations.
After implementing and monitoring an initiative for some time, it is an important management discipline to take stock of the situation through an external evaluation.
Step 1: Pre-evaluation: Initiating the evaluation process
Checking the ‘evaluability,’ or readiness, for evaluation Tools: Evaluation plan template (Chapter 3)
Step 2: Preparation
Agreeing on the management structure of an evaluation and roles and responsibilities Drafting the ToROrganizing the relevant documentationSelecting the evaluation team
Tools: Template and quality criteria for ToR (Annex 3), selection criteria for evaluators (Annex 5)
Briefing and supporting the evaluation teamReviewing the inception report prepared by the evaluation team Reviewing the draft evaluation reportTools: Template and quality criteria for evaluation reports (Annex 7)
Preparing the management response and implementing follow-up actionsPreparing and disseminating evaluation products and organizing knowledge sharing events Reviewing evaluations prior to new planning processes
Tools: Management response template (Annex 6), practical steps for developing knowledge products and dissemination
There should be a clearly defined organization and management structure for an evaluation and established role
Brief the evaluators on the purpose and scope of the evaluation and Ensure that all information is made available to the evaluators. If they encounter any difficulty in obtaining information that is critical for the conduct of evaluation, provide necessary support to the extent possible.
Provide them with relev
Preparing the management response and implementing follow-up actionsPreparing and disseminating evaluation products and organizing knowledge sharing events
Reviewing evaluations prior to new planning processes
ant evaluation policy guidelines