Defining Your Strategic Direction Part 1

Decisions about strategic direction are not made in a vacuum but are determined by two converging forces: the organization's ideology (particularly the mission statement) and the business situation. Think about the following questions in order to make decisions about how your organization will meet the challenges and opportunities of the business environment, now and in the future.

DEFINING YOUR FUTURE VISION

• Customer Satisfaction:  How do your customers judge you on measures of importance to them such as quality, timeliness, performance, service, and cost? Remember that you can't be the best at all of these.
• Organizational Culture:  The organization's culture is the common experience of people regarding "what it is like to work here." It consists of the attitudes and work habits of people within the organization.
• Internal Operations:  This dimension focuses on the adequacy and efficiency of internal processes, competencies, technologies, and systems.
• Financial Performance:  This includes all measures of an organization's financial health such as return on investment, profitability, gross sales, etc.

Until next time...






Sheryl Tuchman, SPHR, SHRM-SCP
http://tools2succeed.com/

Keeping Score on Organizational Goals 2

Steps in Keeping Score:

1. Identify your team's most important key result areas.
2. Select units of measure in each key result area
3. Assess current performance in each key result area.
4. Set goals to make improvements.

Step 1: Identify Key Result Areas (KRA's)
The first step in scorekeeping is to identify the key result areas most important to your team.
    These are broad categories in which you want to evaluate your team's success.
    They are qualitative as opposed to quantitative.
    They should be aligned to the strategy and goals of the larger organization.
    They generally fall into one of the following four categories:
 
Quality (examples)

• Customer
• On-time delivery
• Accuracy
• Defects 

Internal operations (examples)

• Rate of production 
• Cycle time
• Employee satisfaction
• Safety

Development (examples)

• Product innovation
• Employee empowerment
• Process improvement

Finances (examples)

• Profitability
• Costs
• ROI

What are your team's most important key result areas?
 
Begin by reviewing the strategy and direction of your team as well as the goals and objectives of the larger organization of which you are a part, then talk together with your team members to identify what is working and what is not working for your team.  Next, identify the key result areas (KRA's) most important to your success.  List each key result area and then note why it is important. Click here for a template which you can use to list what is working, what is not working, and your KRA's.

Until next time...






Sheryl Tuchman, SPHR, SHRM-SCP
http://tools2succeed.com/