In my last post I said strategy mapping is “seemingly simple” because environments have different requirements depending on the industry, size, growth patterns, and degree of change. For example, an implantable medical device manufacturer I worked with was more concerned with having scalable business processes and systems because they expected extremely high growth once the FDA approved their new design. Typically companies have high level goals related to revenue and costs that drive all strategies. But the medical device company really wasn’t concerned with X% revenue growth- they were more concerned with business processes and systems that could handle being …read more

Aligning projects with strategies, assuming that the company has strategies, is one of the simplest ways to quickly see which projects are worth doing. Conversely, projects that don’t align with strategies should quickly be assessed and probably stopped. One of the ways to get a read on alignment is to simply put together a strategy map. The concept is seemingly simple:
1. Id goals of company- increase shareholder value, increase revenue by X%, decrease costs by X% are examples.
2. Id strategies to fulfill the goals- for the revenue goal it might be a customer response program or a web based presence …read more