Mapping business strategy step-by-step

A strategy map provides a concise, clear means of planning and communicating strategy, enabling members of the organization and other stakeholders to understand and support the strategy, and allowing the measurement of progress with respect to the stated goals.

  1. The first step in creating your business strategy map is to articulate a strategic vision for your organization. This vision is a statement of where you want the organization to be in the future (for example, in the next five years) and provides direction for the overall strategy: all the elements that are part of your strategy map will be tied to this vision. For example, an airline executive could describe a vision for the company that communicates a specific 5 year goal such as In five years, JKAir will be the leading airline for short-haul flights in North America, outranking competitors in terms of customer satisfaction and value.
  2. Create a new strategy map, using your vision statement as the basis of the strategy map name.
  3. List some goals that support your vision, asking the question What are some intermediate objectives or shorter term goals that we need to meet to achieve this vision? Create these goals as child elements in your strategy map.

    For example, based on the vision statement, the JKAir executives might build a strategy map that starts from the overall strategy JKAir ranks highest in customer satisfaction and value on short haul flights.

    They define the following high-level goals in support of this strategy:
    • Convenient services at all stages of customer interaction
    • Outstanding inflight service
    • Rank number one for reliability

  4. You might want to decompose your high-level goals into sub-goals so that each sub-goal can be articulated and tracked separately. As a guiding principle, try to list goals that are specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely (S.M.A.R.T.). For example, if you find that your first set of goals are not concrete enough to be measurable, you might have to break them down into shorter term sub-goals that can have actions and measures associated with them.
    For example, JKAir can further refine their high-level goals with following sub-goals:
    • Convenient services at all stages of customer interaction
      • More flights from more airport locations
      • Offer expedited checkin
    • Outstanding inflight service
      • Provide inflight meal service
      • All customer-facing employees are knowledgeable, friendly, and efficient
    • Rank number one for reliability
      • Flights are on-time
      • Baggage handling is dependable.
    These sub-goals are added as child elements of the high-level goals created in step 3.
  5. Identify the success criteria or measures for each goal so that you can answer the question How do we know how well we are performing relative to this goal? A measure should have a target, such as "95% of flights arrive within 5 minutes of scheduled arrival time," so that it is clear when the goal has been achieved.
  6. For each goal, you should be able to define a set of actions that contribute to the achievement of that goal.

    For example, in support of the Offer expedited checkin goal, JKAir might need to define actions that include reengineering of the process for customer checkin. For the Provide inflight meal service goal, JKAir might want to add a new business capability to their organization for food services, or look at outsourcing the meal delivery service.

  7. The strategy map you define for your overall organization might include several child maps, for example, so that individual departments can create their own strategy maps that fit into the overall vision.

    For example, the Human Resources business unit of JKAir has created their own strategy map that builds on the goal All customer-facing employees are knowledgeable, friendly, and efficient. The Human Resources strategy map contains all of the department-internal goals, measures, and actions that feed into this higher-level strategic goal.

What to do next
You might want to document and analyze the business factors that influence your strategy as you map your goals for reaching your strategy, and as you identify actions for reaching your goals.