Interviewing for Strategic Information

Strategic Planning is an organization’s process of defining its goals & strategies over a period of time, especially within a long-range planning horizon of three, five, or more, years, that:

• Sets priorities and makes budget decisions
• Helps anticipate changes in the environment and adjust accordingly
• Establishes shared goals & strategies to help align everyone’s activities with the direction of the organization

Establishing a clear understanding of the organization and the environment in which it operates is an important starting point for strategic planning. The organizational assessment, introduced in the previous entry, is the approach typically applied to achieve this understanding. During the assessment, interviews with key stakeholders are conducted to gather information to be included in a profile describing the organizational environment. Many interview responses will also help to formulate key parts of the strategic plan.

There are many potential interview questions that can be asked as part of the assessment. Each assessment interview tool should be tailored to the organization being assessed. However, I have found this set of questions useful in many different strategic planning projects for technology services:

1. Who are you?
1. Name?
2. Job Title?
3. Department-Division?
4. Direct Manager?
5. Direct Reports?
2. What current systems are used in your Department-Division?
1. System = a technology-enabled mechanism that supports business operations or service delivery through voice, text, image, application, software, hardware, network, or other data processing, storage, communication, or sharing. Some examples could be a document management system, an accounting system, a work order system, an on-line payment system, a desktop data management application, a voice radio system, or wireless phone system with Push-to-Talk functionality for job-site communications.
3. For each current system, what business processes are supported?
1. A business process is a set of coordinated activities that accomplish a specific organizational goal—like producing a service or product that delivers value to a specific type of customer. People, systems, or other resources interact with the business process and execute process activities. Examples of business processes could include payment requisition processing in Accounting, or customer order processing in Sales.
4. For each current system, who are the users?
1. Which people use which current systems? What are their job/participant roles/functions? How many people are in each role?
5. For each current system, what are the existing integrations or interfaces?
1. What are the interactions between current systems and other systems, departments, partners, or other entities? What data is provided to or requested from inside or outside entities?
6. For each current system, what are its issues or constraints?
1. Are there opportunities to improve, or limitations to the effectiveness of, current systems?
7. What modified or new systems capabilities do you need to successfully conduct operations and deliver services in the next one or two years?
8. What modified or new systems capabilities do you need to successfully conduct operations and deliver services in the following three to five years?
9. What modified or new systems capabilities do you envision successfully conducting operations and delivering services in the following six to ten years?
10. Is there anything else concerning technology services, support, or related activities that you would like to share?

Since strategic planning is an iterative process, typically defined as an organizational strategy within a planning initiative of an organization's strategic plan, information gathered in earlier planning cycles can be used to refine, revise, and improve the stakeholder interview instruments for each iteration.

Assessing the Organization

The elements of the Strategic Planning Foundation – Vision, Mission, Goals & Objectives, and Principles take the first step to address the needs discovered during the Environmental and Organizational Assessment performed in the Strategic Planning portion of a Strategic Technology Services Management system. Its important to perform an in-depth organizational assessment through review of prior planning projects or vision reports combined with interviews and surveys of management, staff, or other stakeholders to:

• Identify environmental forces, major business drivers, and enduring values
• Document specific external or internal business, societal, and technology trends potentially affecting technology services & the organization
• List specific external and internal challenges or uncertainties facing technology services & the organization
• Discover technology and best practices in those areas that would enhance the capability to respond to stakeholders’ service needs

Candidates for organizational assessment interviews or surveys could include: board members, trustees, officers, presidents/vice presidents, executives, department/division heads, managers/employees, customers, partners, and other potential stakeholders. I will provide sample strategic planning interview questions in a future post.

The organizational assessment typically includes methods for scanning or examining the environmental factors influencing goals, objectives, and other values of or constraints upon the organization. A PESTLE (Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal, and Environmental) analysis can be used to describe macro-environmental factors. A SWOT analysis can be used to evaluate the “Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats” involved in technology services. SWOT clarifies objectives and internal or external factors that positively or negatively affect achieving objectives. By matching strengths or converting threats into opportunities, strategies can be developed to account for the environment surrounding technology services. For example, during a recent planning project, a weakness was identified around customer support services for application usage issues. Several strategies proposed in the resulting plan addressed different aspects of this issue to provide enhanced capabilities for application usage support and converting this weakness into a strength for customer support services.

The organizational assessment should describe the current state of technology services operations and analyze that state against industry, business, and other applicable best practices or benchmarks to identify any gaps. Using the organizational assessment and gap analysis, planners can identify definitions, changes, or additions to strategic goals, initiatives, or strategies to be included in the plan to address unmet strategic technology needs. For instance, the definitions of goals can often be refined using this information to better follow the S.M.A.R.T. goal setting model – defining Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound goals. These refined strategic goals will often imply changes in strategies. The modified strategic items and related assessment or analysis information will in turn be used during ensuing tactical or operational planning.

Aligning Strategy Using Decomposition

Strategic Technology Services Management (STSM) calls for a collection of strategies, organized into strategic initiatives and focus areas (the Strategic elements of the STSM Framework).  Every strategy should derive from the organization's mission, vision, goals, objectives, and guiding principles (the Foundational elements of the STSM Framework). One useful tool for visualizing this collection is a strategy map.  For example, a typical top-level city government strategy map could look something like this:

Municipal Government Strategy Map

In government organizations, the strategy map represents a value chain similar to those for a business, but with a different end point. At the top of the value chain is the Constituent/Stakeholder perspective, because government organizations are in the business of satisfying constituent and stakeholder needs (e.g., Citizens, Officials, Staff, or Partners). In governments, the end of the value chain is the effectiveness of services and service delivery at addressing those needs and constantly improving outcomes that affect the community’s quality of life. As can be seen, improvements in use of technology represent a key organizational capacity strategy that supports all other strategies. In addition, most of the strategies shown at this macro level can also be represented as more narrow strategies addressing the management of technology services.

Using the example Focus Areas cited in a previous post, STSM calls for a continuous strategic, tactical, and operational planning initiative to primarily address the needs defined for an Ensure Quality focus area. This iterative planning initiative also impacts all other focus areas and technology services activities. This type of initiative is most often referred to in business fields as strategic management. It is also considered the cornerstone of the strategic leadership model.

Pathways: Plan for Future

One way to visualize this initiative and its outcomes is to use a variant of the strategy map called a strategic pathways diagram. The individual strategies incorporated in this planning initiative (Refine Strategic Plan, Develop Tactical & Operational Plans, Measure Performance Against Plans, Disseminate Plans, and Review & Update Plans) provide the crucial connections between the initiative and it's higher-level focus groups.

This is only one example, at the technology services strategic planning level, of how the Improve Utilization of Technology strategy can be decomposed into additional, more detailed strategies that directly link to the organizational strategic plan.  I'll address more examples in future postings.

Establishing an Iterative Strategic Planning Framework

PDCA/PDSA are simplified acronyms for a proven scientific method developed by Shewhart and Deming typically referenced in Strategic Management/Planning, Business Process Improvement, or Continuous Quality Improvement disciplines:

Shewhart/Deming PDCA/PDSA Cycle

1. PLAN : Establish the objectives and processes necessary to deliver results in accordance with the expected output. By making the expected output the focus, it differs from other techniques in that the completeness and accuracy of the specification is also part of the improvement.
2. DO: Implement and measure outcomes of the new processes. Often on a small scale if possible.
3. CHECK/STUDY: Compare the measured results against the expected results to ascertain any differences. Analyze the differences to determine their cause. Each will be part of either one or more of the P-D-C-A components.
4. ACT: Determine where to apply changes that will include improvement, and feed these changes into the next PDCA planning cycle at the appropriate strategic, tactical, or operational level.

When a pass through these four steps does not result in the need to improve, refine the scope to which PDCA is applied until there is a plan that involves improvement. When a pass does result in the need to improve, make the improvement and then apply PDCA to the improved processes to seek further improvement.

STSM Connections

Strategic Technology Services Management (STSM), a well-defined discipline for many years under differing labels, seeks to formalize the connections between strategy, business process, and technology by aligning:

1. Strategy with stakeholders needs – transforming environmental opportunities to strategic services
2. Business process with strategy – Identifying process flows (work, communications, and data) with multi-tiered processes applying strategic transformations
3. Technology with business process - Defining architecture, systems, applications, and communications infrastructure enabling business processes and strategic transformations by delivering strategically focused technology services

The sequence for establishing these connections is important for ensuring strategic outcomes. The first type of connection defines expected successful and measurable outcomes for every stakeholder interaction with a business process to answer “why” a service is needed and provided. The second type of connection answers the “How, Who, What, When” questions about a business process while identifying critical components such as potential break points and business rules. The third type of connection answers the questions about “What technology is appropriate to support the business processes and deliver the expected successful outcomes to the stakeholders.

In this top-down planning approach, from stakeholder expectations to processes to the tasks performed by staff, all effort is aimed to align process performance with stakeholder expectations. The technology identified creates a standards-based infrastructure that should be open, flexible, extensible, and scalable. This infrastructure must also be managed by tactical or operational processes drawn from industry best practices in disciplines such as project, risk, innovation, and asset management as appropriate to the needs of the business or organization.

Another critical component of this process framework, too often overlooked, is the people executing the processes. Though a very small but highly talented and motivated staff can perform miracles, such a heroic level of effort does not scale well over time. Therefore, planning should explore some best practices and strategies aimed at proper management of human resources.

A first iteration Strategic Plan is a high-level document that provides overall direction on a number of priority issues impacting the technology services of the business or organization. It typically calls for the establishment of a strategic management system based on a vision, mission, goals, objectives, and guiding principles aligned with stakeholder or organizational goals and needs.

The primary audience for this strategic plan is managers of stakeholders receiving services from, and managers of, technology services. However, all stakeholders of, and staff within, an organization will find this plan invaluable in understanding how and why resources are focused on strategic management issues to achieve business and departmental goals.

The typical Strategic Plan is organized into a strategic planning foundation, followed by a small number of strategic focus areas; i.e., "Ensure Quality," "Accommodate Growth & Change," and "Drive Innovation." Each focus area is addressed by a small number of strategic initiatives; i.e., "Plan for Future," "Apply Procedural Best Practices," "Establish Efficient Infrastructure," "Effectivly Apply Staff Resources," and "Provide Superlative Service." A number of strategies are described to implement these strategic initiatives. Organizational and environmental assessment, background information, best practices, and other supporting materials are included, often in the plan's Appendices. This plan also constitutes a report on the findings of the first iteration strategic planning effort.

Over the next few years, staff should work to refine the strategic plan. Staff should develop tactical and operational plans for each strategic focus area that provide detail and specificity regarding implementation of the initiatives and strategies in the strategic plan. This detail should include identifying the resources tasked with implementing the strategy, a time frame for implementation, processes that produce required outcomes or deliverables, and related performance measures. Post-implementation review and analysis of the outcomes, deliverables, and performance measures will drive the definition of changes needed to improve the strategic results. Those changes will then be applied immediately, if possible, or during the next iteration of the strategic planning cycle, to continuously improve all plans, processes, and outcomes.

Strategic planning and management provides specific immediate benefits:

• Enhances collaboration and networking between departments
• Provides better understanding of other people’s roles and responsibilities
• Develops a big picture perspective towards meeting challenges

The strategic planning process helps the organization clarify its strategy and translate it into action by enhancing the ability of staff to understand how a specific activity and its performance relate to the priorities of the business.

Strategic management and leadership focuses on the measurement of service performance throughout the service life cycle in order to discover improvements that ensure a service delivers the maximum benefit for a manageable cost. Engaging in strategic management and leadership also prepares staff to adapt to the ever-changing technology environment and be better prepared for adjusting capacity to reflect changes in the economic or governance environments.

Through implementation of the strategic plan, the organization will continue to direct available resources towards providing technology infrastructure and services supporting the stakeholders’ priorities for the business or organization.

Focusing Strategic Technology Planning

In this blog, I intend to bring focus on managing technology services as a set of strategic initiatives. This is not a new topic in our field, but one that is little discussed or not implemented successfully in most organizations.

An iterative strategic planning program is called for to establish strategic management with strategic leadership and other best practice components appropriate to technology services and aligned with organizational goals or needs. There are four strategically significant reasons for planning – to:

• Do the Right Job
• Do the Job Right
• Adapt to Change
• Leverage Opportunity

Improvements in use of technology represent a key organizational strategy that supports all other strategies. In the first iteration of strategic planning, the focus is primarily on processes needed for effective Strategic Technology Services Management (STSM). STSM encompasses four primary management disciplines:

• SM: Strategic Management
• PPM: Project Portfolio Management
• ITSM: Information Technology Service Management
• ITIM: Information Technology Infrastructure Management

The strategic plan sets high-level directions of strategic focus, initiatives, and strategies appropriate to a planning horizon, typically five or ten years in the future. It is broad and generic in much of its content to avoid limiting technology operations and innovation over this period, while providing a framework to support adaptation to changes in the organizational environment. Some planning goals set for this first iteration could include:

• Identify expected expansion or growth
• Identify resource constraints (people, funding, etc.)
• Improve inter-departmental understanding such as:
• Better tie-ins
• Know what they are doing
• Coordinate planning

• Plan to study the many initiatives, strategies, and programs identified in this first plan in more iterations of strategic, tactical, and operational planning
• Define an entire technology organizational and governance model with resource requirements.

A typical technology services organization has responsibilities similar to these:

• Oversee the design and construction of voice, data, or video network infrastructure
• Build a collaborative technology infrastructure (directories, e-mail, calendaring, document management, Web portal) and deploy major applications
• Oversee the installation of technology facilities
• Deploy, manage, and maintain computers
• Develop a support organization for all of the above.

These responsibilities require governance structures in place for defining a vision or mission, setting goals, identifying principles, developing strategies, prioritizing needs, and determining policy. These structures must enable staff to make quick decisions about interim solutions compatible with long-term strategy.