The traditional approach to strategy execution is failing modern organizations.
Across every industry, leaders are struggling to:
- Create strategic plans connected to a mission
- Align teams with strategy
- Execute the strategy with certainty
- Adapt strategy without friction
If any of these challenges sound like what your organization is going through, this article is for you. It’s time to understand why committing to a platform is the key to mastering strategy execution.
What is a strategy execution platform?
Based on your organization’s unique challenges, a strategy execution platform fulfills various needs. But before we get there, let's establish a clear definition of what a strategy execution platform is to understand its impact on your workplace.
A strategy execution platform coordinates a seamless approach to strategy in your organization through four components: plan, align and activate, execute, and assess and adapt.
Plan: Create a strategy that connects your teams and your data in one place.
Align and Activate: Connect decision making and create clear definitions of success.
Execute: Collaborate with certainty, transparency, and trust to accomplish the mission.
Assess and Adapt: Clarify what works, what doesn’t, and make changes quickly.
Through alignment with the different strategy execution components, a platform connects your teams to the clearly-defined, transparent goals of the organization. Whether you’re overhauling strategy or refining the one you’ve got, a strategy execution platform enables focus and decision-making autonomy where you need it most.
Learn more about the full capabilities of strategy execution platforms
How a strategy execution platform transforms your workplace
The gap between strategy and execution is one of the biggest vulnerabilities businesses face. In this gap, teams lose alignment, disengage with each other, and silo into disconnected work chains with little impact.
Most organizations are stuck in a traditional, industrial approach to strategy execution. Plagued by a top-down, hierarchical model, employees are stuck in disempowered, unfocused, and uncoordinated silos of execution.
By shifting your organization to a culture of outcomes, a strategy execution platform is your stepping stone into how a modern business should operate.
Democratizing decision making. Breaking down the barriers to collaboration. Aligning teams with strategic objectives.
This reality is no longer wishful thinking or a lofty ambition with the power of a strategy execution platform. Further supported by OKRs and KPIs, your organization can be guided by measurable results, not uncertainty.
Features and benefits are great, but focus and structure are what today’s workplace needs the most. So, which platform capabilities are critical for guiding your organization to successful strategy execution?
Plan strategy
Strategy planning is about building a gameplan to support your organization’s vision. The right strategy execution platform can help you define a strategy in line with high-level aspirations of the business.
Planning a strategy that inspires teams is foundational to achieving the best possible outcomes — a strategy execution platform brings much-needed visibility to corporate and business strategy.
By clarifying where the organization is trying to go, the time and resources needed to deploy a strategy aren’t wasted. Motivated by strategic purpose, a strategy execution platform furthers your team’s dedication by incorporating mission-critical data into the planning process.
With everyone receiving the same information, a culture of transparency and trust is built from the beginning. Data helps validate strategy and prove direction, improving the collective buy-in between teams and leaders.
With a strategy execution platform, teams are no longer inhibited by disconnection. They know what to focus on, why they should focus there, and how each person on the team is contributing to the collective focus.
How Quantive helps you plan:
- Monitor key insights on current progress and Confidence Level changes
- Leverage KPIs and Key Results to make decisions on where to go next
- Create an unconstrained safe space for ideas in Whiteboards
Learn more about Quantive's plan capabilities
Align and activate strategy
Your organization can plan the greatest strategy in the world, but it's useless without the ability to connect it to your teams. According to Kaplan and Norton in The Balanced Scorecard, ~90% of businesses fail at strategy execution — alignment and activation is an overlooked step in the strategy execution process.
Everything concerning your strategy has one home in a strategy execution platform. This makes your data and all the decisions connected to it transparent, anywhere and anytime.
Teams aren’t just unified and aligned on outcome(s) — a platform enables an organizational, cultural shift to focus on the metrics that matter and initiatives that move the needle.
When teams have frictionless connection and alignment on desired outcomes, the stage is set for open collaboration. A strategy execution platform enables co-ownership of responsibilities, creating accountability and results for your most imperative initiatives.
A strategy execution platform is the remedy for every employee’s “check the box” syndrome. With proper alignment and activation, there’s no more “cog in the machine” or busy-work sentiment in your culture — just purpose-filled, engaged teams.
How Quantive helps you align and activate:
- Start with the Alignment View and home dashboard to organize seamlessly
- Use Cascading Key Results to align multiple teams/individuals to a single key result, enabling collaboration on a shared outcome
- Link OKRs with projects, tasks, and other OKRs to show key dependencies in reaching goals
Learn more about Quantive's align and activate capabilities
Execute strategy
Uncertainty is the greatest inhibitor to effective, agile strategy execution.
Confident decision making is a core value of strategy execution platforms and the counter to uncertainty. Teams have the clarity to execute with excellence through clear value-add pathways, easily accessible data, and channels for collaboration.
The right platform shows you what’s happening in real time, enabling rapid feedback and performance check-ins for more effective execution.
The transparency of a platform shows teams how progress is being made and why. Goal certainty strengthens the collaboration of teams, supported by clearly defined outcomes and data-driven decision-making.
A strategy execution platform shifts human attention to where it’s needed most — collaboration and alignment — and away from where it’s ineffective — data inputs and manual processes. By reducing the risk around your data and lifting the burden of tracking insights, your teams are primed to focus on what matters most.
How Quantive helps you execute:
- Link everyday tools and reduce manual data collection with 170+ integrations
- Build a transparent, data-first culture with automation of Dynamic Key Results, KPIs, and Insights
- Stay alert to progress changes with OKR update reminders and aggregated OKR progress
Learn more about Quantive's execute capabilities
Assess and adapt strategy
Strategy is an ever-changing process. Assessing what did or didn’t work, then making changes based on this insight, is how you transform a stagnating strategy into a resilient one.
Feedback loops are ineffective for most organizations because they’re too slow.
An OKR-centered strategy execution platform compresses the feedback loop with key results and KPIs informing your strategy along the way. You receive faster feedback, which leads to better optimization, and progress monitoring allows you to shift resources to initiatives driving the right outcomes.
In traditional strategy assessments, critical insights are cascaded through levels of bureaucracy and the message is lost in translation. A strategy execution platform gives you performance insights in real-time, allowing your teams to pivot focus without a lag.
Traditional business is plagued by slow adaptation — with a strategy execution platform, you can modernize your operations. Gain complete visibility on progress, full insights on which actions to take based on a data-backed “why” it should be taken, and how to do it quickly at scale.
How Quantive helps you execute:
- Analyze and pivot with executive dashboards through Insightboards
- Assign resources proactively through Process Automation and Task Management
- Access voting in Whiteboards and reflect new initiatives and focus with OKR States
Learn more about Quantive's assess and adapt capabilities
Why your company needs a strategy execution platform
Strategy execution will always be complex, but it doesn’t have to be complicated. A strategy execution platform is your solution to creating a mission-driven strategy, engaging teams, and delivering a proactive, outcome-driven approach to execution.
Take the next step with Quantive's strategy execution platform
Quantive is your bridge between strategy and execution. Founded on the objectives and key results (OKR) methodology, our Strategy Execution Platform is where businesses plan successful strategy, focus and align teams to it, and stay on the leading edge of progress.
As your company looks to achieve the best possible results, you need a modern approach to run your business and change your business. The Modern Operating Model brings strategy, teams, and data together to help make decisions faster, optimize operations, and drive better business outcomes.
Whether you’re a large enterprise facing competitive disruption or a small business leading the innovative charge, Quantive helps get you where you want to go.
Ready to achieve the best possible? Start using Quantive for free.
