As we go through our strategy development process there will inevitably be things that come out of left field that we need to adapt to, whether its a new requirement, a change in personnel, a new imperative that we need to adapt our strategy to, uncovering a difficult stakeholder or problem, the list goes on. However for the most part we should be clear about the key milestones that we aim to hit during the process. In my experience a small bit of thinking and planning can go a long way to ensuring we successfully hit those milestones, and minimise the risk of us tripping over these key hurdles.

So, what are some of these key hurdles? Here are 4 key ones that i try and think about

1 Mobilisation and Communication

Before starting the strategy development there are some key questions we need to be clear on:

• What does mobilising the strategy development look like?

• Who needs to be involved?

• Who needs to be aware and how are we going to communicate to those people?

• What is the scope of the strategy we are developing?

• What is the strategy ‘Elevator Pitch’?

• What does the strategy development ‘team’ look like? (what skills do you need to draw on to design the strategy?)

2 Governance and Approval

Being clear on how the strategy design and activation will be governed and approved is really important, if we aren’t clear on this it will absolutely bite us later. I’ve experienced this where we thought we were clear on the governance mechanism and approval process for the strategy, then at the 11th hour a new requirement left us scrambling to a) get stakeholders on board b) prepare and present to the new stakeholder group c) address and iterate on feedback from the new stakeholder group. A bit more exploration upfront, and confirming stakeholder groups would have a saved us a lot of last minute work.

3 Playback and Iteration

At some point during the strategy design process we will need playback stakeholders and iterate on the feedback, if we don’t plan this in, both the playback points, and the time we will require to iterate based on feedback then we’ll end up blowing our planned timelines. What i try and do is get the feedback points in as early as possible, if i’m nervous about presenting my thinking so far, then i think thats a good test that its the right time to get feedback, if i’m not nervous then i think it indicates that i’m already too fixed and invested on my thinking/synthesis. I try to playback early and often, and hold my ideas loosely.

4 Design to Activation

What does the transition from Design into activation look like for our strategy? we need to be clear on when we are biasing toward doing, also our team and our stakeholders need to be. A key question that i often left unanswered or not explicitly answered in strategy development is ‘where exactly are we in the process?’. We need to be able to answer and communicate this at any stage during the process, but especially when we transition from design to activation.

What about you? what are some key hurdles that you think about when developing an IT strategy? and which of these have tripped you up in the past? let me know in the comments.