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.