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| April 1, 2010 | Chris Jones, MBA, FCMC, STRATEGYLink Consulting | Competencies are not enough! | ***image2*** |
| July 30, 2010 |
Chris Jones, MBA, FCMC, STRATEGYLink Consulting | Build an organization, not hamburgers! |
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| March 10, 2011 | Chris Jones, MBA, FCMC, STRATEGYLink Consulting | Automating Grant Adjudication – The Next Big Thing in Grant-Making? | ***image7*** |
For many years, HR professionals have attracted the attention of senior managers with their refrain about “our people are our most valuable resource therefore we should manage them well”. They have moved from “performance measurement” through “performance management” and now they talk about “talent management”.
All well and good. But none of these approaches squarely addresses the executive team’s most crucial question - how well is our strategy being executed? Why? Because they focus on employee competencies and not on the organization’s own strategies.
A football coach coaches his team play-by-play, day-to-day and game-to-game. He builds team improvements into each game as the season progresses. At the end of the season he might achieve the team’s objectives. If he didn’t do this regular coaching and improvement throughout the season, what chance would he have of meeting the team’s objectives – and keeping his job?
Business, government and non-profit organizations rarely operate this way. They develop a plan, often at considerable expense, promise to follow it, and then shelve it until part-way through the year. Then they dust it off, find they have not achieved all their objectives, and the employees are told that the planning process didn’t work.
Wrong! The planning process might be just fine – it is the execution management process that doesn’t work!
Welcome to the exciting new world of strategic execution management or “SEM”, an innovative approach which enables the organization to deliver on its promises.
Strategy execution management reflects a fundamental difference in concept and approach – more like the football coach than the traditional manager. The employee competencies might be superb, but if they are not applied directly to the execution of the strategy, they are less than valuable. SEM is about knowing how well those promises that the Deputy made in the strategic plan are actually being delivered from day to day.
If there were something such as a “strategy execution management system” what would it look like? First, it would be initiative based, not competency based, and focussed completely on the organization’s strategies. Second, it would use explicit performance agreements between the managers and the staff. Third, goal measurement would use pre-set criteria and explicit performance measures and would talk about how goals were “missed”, “met” or exceeded”. Fourth, everyone would be in the loop, so the system would direct and manage internal communications with pre-scheduled and pre-scored progress meetings. Fifth, the system would be dynamic so that it would easily reflect changes in goals and initiatives as the organization’s circumstances and priorities change during the year, as they always do. Sixth, the senior management team and the program managers would have dashboards so that they could review the performance of their part of the organization whenever they wished. Seventh, it would be low cost, low risk and work right out of the box - it would have to be web-based and not require the implementation of expensive software. And eighth, it would be scalable so that any size of organization could use it.
Impossible, you might say? Well some of organizations in the US, UK and Canada are already using proprietary SEM systems every day, with great success. Some non-profits are too, and so is my firm. Shouldn’t you?
Expect to hear a lot about strategy execution management systems over the next few years!
Submitted by: Chris Jones, MBA, FCMC, STRATEGYLink Consulting
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Competencies are not enough! 
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Build an organization, not hamburgers!
Chris Jones, MBA, FCMC, STRATEGYLink Consulting
July 30, 2010
Ray Kroc didn’t get rich selling McDonald’s hamburgers, he got rich selling franchises to other folks who got rich selling McDonald’s hamburgers. Chris Jones, MBA, FCMC, STRATEGYLink Consulting
July 30, 2010
Businesses that sell hamburgers have to be good at two very different things – making and selling hamburgers and building organizations that make and sell hamburgers. How often do we come across organizations – government or otherwise - that are good at making and selling the hamburgers but not so good at building businesses?
Kroc found the secret to building the businesses and left it to the franchisees to make and sell the hamburgers. They didn’t have to be good at building businesses because the franchise showed them exactly how to do it.
A franchise has a system. Indeed it is a system. Without the system inherent in the franchise, neither Kroc nor his franchisees would have gotten rich.
All organizations, governments included, need a culture of discipline – this means discipline in thought followed by discipline in execution – and both functions need systems for them to work.
Discipline in thought is most often represented by some form of strategic or business planning process. Every government organization has one. But what about the discipline in execution? What about a system to make sure the plan prepared with such effort and expense is executed as the Minister, the Deputy and the Executive intended it to be executed?
Therein lies the rub. While there are many planning systems around, until recently there was no such thing as a “strategy execution management system”. This is a system that helps make sure that the strategy the Deputy and the Executive execute reflects the various components of the plans which the Minister approved (and increasingly, were made public). It makes sure the organization is managed as well as the hamburgers are made and sold. Performance management? Not really, because that addresses employee competencies, not strategic initiatives.
If you don’t have an execution system, you are playing Russian roulette with the results. Is this important for governments? I think so.
In recent years several “strategy execution management systems” have appeared in the marketplace. Most of them are little more than automated personnel appraisal systems with a new name. A survey of North American organizations were looked at and most were found to not fill the bill since they focused on employee competencies, not on corporate initiatives. This research can prove useful as performance management systems are used in many government organizations. But competencies are not enough - the Deputy needs a way to focus on the organization’s strategic initiatives, not just on its employee competencies.
Submitted by: Chris Jones, MBA, FCMC, STRATEGYLink Consulting
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Chris Jones, MBA, FCMC, STRATEGYLink
Consulting
March 10, 2011
With the current economic malaise and cut-backs in government spending, many grant-making organizations have experienced significant increases in the number of grant applications they receive. This means more work for the grant adjudicators – in most cases with no more staff.
Grant funds are in greater demand than ever but there is no more money to go around. The number of successful applications and the total funds disbursed are about the same. Poorer applications take just as long to adjudicate as the best of them, sometimes longer, but now there are more of them.
So, ironically, the increased effort is directed mainly to the adjudication of the unsuccessful applications, not the successful ones.
Isn’t there something wrong with this picture?
Grant-makers have been quick to adopt automated grant application and grant management systems and some are now web-based. There is little more scope for efficiency there. So where else can efficiencies be made?
Perhaps the most important function of a grant-maker is to decide who gets the grants and who doesn’t, based on competitive applications. This is the adjudication process. It is difficult, time-consuming, labour-intensive and sensitive work and it usually involves consideration of a wide variety of adjudication criteria and other factors.
Could this be the next area to be automated?
Some years ago the Canadian science and technology research granting sector had the same problems. Too many grant applications (many with almost no chance of funding); difficulties in deciding which should be funded and which shouldn’t; too much time and effort spent evaluating unsuccessful applications; and, those occasionally acrimonious debriefing meetings with the unsuccessful applicants, some of whom didn’t really understand the criteria.
In short they solved these problems. They made the adjudication criteria much more explicit; added explicit performance/compliance measures to the criteria; designed an applicant self-assessment process; incorporated “peer-group” adjudications; designed a comprehensive feedback report for the applicants; and, added an evaluation component at the end. Then they put the whole thing into a software package easily learned by volunteer or professional adjudicators. Some of the largest research funders in Canada adopted it right away and the process has adjudicated some $12 billion in applications for over 100 organizations in the last ten years – not least in the federal and some provincial governments. Adjudications are now performed quickly and efficiently on the web. No hands, no paper.
The self-assessments resulted in fewer applications - but those received were of higher quality and more compliant. There were fewer losing applications to adjudicate. The comprehensive applicant reporting system rendered debriefings a thing of the past.
Isn’t this what grantors should be aiming for?
The methodology and the software are now available to granting organizations that think they spend too much time and effort in adjudicating increasing numbers of losing applications.
Submitted by: Chris Jones, MBA, FCMC, STRATEGYLink Consulting
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Automating Grant Adjudication – The Next Big Thing in Grant-Making?
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