Strategic planning is an integral part of the success of any organization or office. The process of bringing together a variety of stakeholders and honing in on what goals align with your mission, vision, and values creates a framework that is incredibly valuable in measuring your office’s successes, failings, and building long and short term plans for the future.
Most of us understand what a stereotypical strategic planning retreat looks like – and even more so we’re familiar with the packets of paper that seem to follow us home from such events. Many times after the retreat those papers, directives, and the ambitious plans the team brainstormed end up buried and long forgotten. Why is that?
Well, according to some industry leaders, setting poor performance metrics can be part of the problem. Joe Krause is a co-founder of AchieveIt, and over the past 10 years has helped clients execute thousands of strategic, operational, and project plans. Joe recently presented a training on strategic planning and performance metrics for WACO, and we were able to ask him a few questions on the subject.
“Performance metrics at all levels of the organization are important because of the old saying coined by Peter Drucker, ‘What gets measured, gets managed.’ If we’re not consistently measuring outcomes in our respective organization, it becomes nearly impossible to understand the cause and effect of your various actions.” – Joe Krause
When Joe and his cofounders created AchieveIt, their mission was to empower plan leaders to unlock their potential by elevating strategy execution through innovative solutions. Their company has helped redefine strategy execution for many counties, cities, school districts, hospitals and large healthcare providers, companies, and even banking institutions. Their trick? Setting quality performance metrics.
“A good set of performance metrics offers an organization the ability to focus and spend their budget more effectively.” Joe told us, “If you see a performance measure isn’t improving despite your best efforts, you can then decide to shift those monies over to an area that’s performing better. This approach allows for you to never utter the dreaded words, ‘let’s just see how it goes.’”
When you search “performance metrics” online, millions of results will immediately populate on your screen. Information from Harvard Business Review, KPI resources from Adobe, and, of course, a Wikipedia page describing the concept are just a few of thousands of articles and guides that you’ll be flooded with. While in a way it’s nice to have many (mostly free) resources available, the old adage of “Quality Over Quantity” has never been more applicable.
“Some people think they have to measure everything in order to get started and that prevents many people from starting their journey toward performance management.” Joe explained to us as we discussed pitfalls in planning, “All you need to do is decide on the ‘critical few’ measures in your organization and start there. You can always add more as you go but to start, less is always more. In a perfect world, every project you agree upon would have 1-3 performance metrics associated with it to ensure your project had the right impact.
The most problematic example I’ve seen regarding performance metrics was [a client that had] over 145 performance metrics in their plan. First off, this is too many measures but secondarily, they didn’t align their work around the metrics. Only 20 or so measures had actions aligned to them, so the other 125 metrics were just sitting in the plan, not improving. You have to choose the metrics that need improvement and stack your projects underneath them.”
Joe let us know that according to recent statistics, on average, organizations only implement about 10% of the strategies they develop – and the only way to improve that statistic is if you find a pragmatic way to track, monitor, and report on every department. So, what does it take to actually guide these initiatives all the way through to completion? When we asked Joe, he gave us three simple steps:
- Get everything in view – so you can see what’s happening with every initiative, at every level, from the enterprise to the individual, in real time.
- Get everyone engaged – with an easy-to-use platform or system that connects your organization from the executive leadership to the project teams, keeping everyone accountable and on the same page.
- Get every possible advantage – find out what resources are available to help you in terms of support, platform, software, etc.
The one thing that is consistent throughout each step, and one of the most important factors in project and planning success, is that data is collected and presented to everyone involved. Some organizations Joe used as examples even had dashboards on their public facing websites, and AchieveIt is currently working to roll out a version of that for counties. The collection and presentation of data takes a great pie-in-the-sky idea and transforms it into an achievable, backable goal. That data also allows offices to pivot in real time when necessary and communicate progress to constituents – showing them where dollars and hours of time are truly going. This provides great transparency for buy-in and keeps everyone appraised of where the team is and how each project is progressing.
“If you don’t have at least 20% of your strategic plan measuring various aspects of the organization you’re missing the boat. The best example I’ve seen [in presenting data and keeping stakeholders in the loop would be a] client [who] purchased a big TV in the waiting area of their building and broadcasted their performance measures and plan 24/7 for all to see. It helped everyone get connected to the results and ensure the plan wasn’t just a flavor of the month.”
So, what do you do if you start delving into the resources, watch the WACO/AchieveIt training, and realize that the goals you set could be the problem? Don’t give up.
“There’s always time to change, the first step is admitting there’s a problem.” Joe was happy to step in and let us know there is always time to fix issues, “You have to ask yourself, if I’m going to spend this money [or time] on this project, what do the people we serve get in return? That return should take the form of a dollar, percentage, or number improving.
I see a lot of words like implement, deploy, develop but those are project words, not words used in performance management. The best advice I give all my clients is that if you can’t insert the words increase, decrease, or maintain in front of the proposed performance measure, then it isn’t quantifiable. If you can’t make that connection, you shouldn’t take on that project.”
Joe explained that AchieveIt was founded because many of their team worked at a variety of organizations previously who had big budgets and tools but fell short on outcomes. They decided there had to be a better way to bring the gap between what folks were saying they were going to do and what they actually did. Like we said earlier in this article, studies show that less than 10% of strategies are executed by the average organization - and Joe and his team, utilizing the performance measure best practices we discussed in tandem with the AchieveIt platform, have seen clients (including counties and cities) improve that number to close to 70% in just a few months. AchieveIt’s core principles drive that improvement:
- Establish uniformity in data collection and reporting
- Create visibility across plans and initiatives
- Promote accountability across the agency
- Monitor project performance with reports & dashboards
- Enable informed decisions with real-time data & proper context
- Embed publicly facing dashboards for transparency
- Track all plans and projects
- Break down siloes across the County and have all departments tracking in a single-source-of-truth platform
Ready to start learning more about how you can align performance metrics to your strategic plan, create visibility and transparency for your constituents, and raise overall execution to drive overall performance? Here are some resources to get you started:
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Thank you to WACO Education Partner AchieveIt for presenting the Strategic Planning: Bridging the Gap Between Goals and Results webinar.
AchieveIt is the Integrated Plan Management solution plan leaders turn to when they want to get things done. For real this time. Too many great ideas never quite make it across the finish line because there’s no real way to keep everyone on course and keep everything on track. That’s why everyone from global corporations to regional healthcare systems to federal government have turned to AchieveIt for their Integrated Plan Management. Let’s actually do this.™
Learn more: https://www.achieveit.com/