The brand new feature from Prakya that helps you avoid execution failure!
The truth of Strategy Execution!
Do you often lose sight of your strategy in the plethora of the work that you are doing right now? Does your team spend extra time to tie your strategy progress to the progress of the current work? For many organizations the answer is a begrudging, yes! We know this because various studies have reported strategy implementation failure rates between 60% to 90%.
As a result of this, organizations create a separate team and structure and spend six figure numbers every month in doing work that simply collects data about the work done and ties it to the organization’s strategic progress! This concept is not alien to agile teams that collaborate to create great products/services. Many times this is thought of as a necessary evil!
Prakya’s Vision: Connecting the dots between Strategy and Execution
When we envisioned Prakya, one of the principles we had in mind was that no one in the organization should be spending time in creating visibility and doing work about work! So we built a platform that hosts an ecosystem of tools that do the heavy lifting and create the needed visibility through the platform.
In one of our previous blogs we have shown how 3ee6ty our visual orchestrator can be utilized to visually orchestrate a strategy. We are now testing a new feature called The Strategy Board to give our users a way to connect their strategy to the actual work that their teams are doing. As a result, the planning gets connected to execution.
Our users will never ever get side tracked from their strategy and goals!
The Strategy Execution Framework: How we connect the dots!
Prakya follows the hierarchy shown in Figure 1 to connect your strategy to execution.
Your strategy is expressed in terms of clear and measurable goals. These goals are achieved through one or more initiatives. Every initiative has a roadmap and each roadmap is achieved with a set of epics/features. This is the model that Prakya uses to connect the dots between your strategy and execution.
Figure 1: Connecting the dots – Linking Strategy to Execution
Once you create this hierarchy, Prakya does the heavy lifting behind the scenes to give you a bird’s eye view of the progress with the ability to drill down into details where necessary.
You can keep your strategy private or you can share it with your teams as needed. Sharing your execution roadmap with your teams allows them to align with the flow of work. This is the first step you can take in building self directed agile teams.
Here’s an annotated snapshot of the actual strategy board that we are testing which will soon roll out as a standard feature.
Figure 2: Prakya’s Strategy Board (Annotated)
As you can see, once the specific epics and features are tied into the initiatives, Prakya does the heavy lifting behind the scenes and begins collecting data points which showcase progress visually. We can drill down to each initiative separately as well.
Each roadmap can indicate which epics/features are tied and the team room gives a sprint level snapshot of the progress of those specific items where required.
Prakya’s ONE Team Dream
Strategy board is definitely not limited to only Engineering. Finance team that funds the project and HR team that provides the hires to work the project are also connected. With Prakya’s strategy board and other features your organization can function as one single living organism.
The strategy board can support different processes that are related to a project’s life cycle.
For example, the finance team may want a cost optimization strategy. They can specify and express this strategy in terms of a set of budgetary goals. The team can then look at the portfolio execution plan and develop a set of initiatives that match with the planned progress of the project. One initiative may want to look at sources of funding and another may look at measuring budget utilization. These initiatives can have detailed roadmaps.
The sourcing initiative may setup a fund acquisition roadmap which can be tied to specific Epics/Features of the Finance Department. The budget utilisation initiative can setup a roadmap of collecting relevant budget utilization data points from the system. This can be tied to the Engineering Epics/Features so as to automate data collection as the team completes user stories in each epic and feature.
At the moment we are discussing with experts about what additional data points we must be able to collect so that we can present a dashboard which can show Earned Value Analysis at the click of a button.
As you read this, more such analytical dashboards are being planned. These feature rollouts can be expected in the near future. We are very excited about it!
Similarly the Talent Management team may want to follow a strategy to supply adequate talent to the organization’s portfolio. They would then express this in the form of talent acquisition and employee engagement goals. Then they would develop the initiatives and roadmap items required for talent acquisition and employee engagement. These would then be tied to specific epics and features of the HR Team and the relevant Epics and Features of the engineering team.
Once this is done, Prakya’s algorithms will start collecting data points that can visually track the progress of these goals as the organization’s portfolio evolves.
We are currently exploring how these data points can be fed into an AI and ML based model which can become our Team Operating System.
Prakya Bridges the gap between Strategy and Execution
Avoiding execution failure is a top challenge for organizations. Even though there are many frameworks that have been proposed by several scholars and consultants, the ground reality is that execution failure continues to be a challenge.
Prakya has built a practical and usable framework that helps organizations to connect their strategy with execution. Once this framework is setup, Prakya’s algorithms do the heavy lifting to create visibility to both the planners as well as the executing teams, reducing the need for a parallel structure that works only to collect data about work done.
We are hopeful that this framework not only bring true agility to teams but also help in saving costs and contributing to the bottom line of an agile organization.
