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.
- 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.
- Create a new strategy map,
using your vision statement as the basis of the strategy map name.
- 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
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.