Many businesses struggle to refine strategic initiatives and the process of assessing and adjusting them. It can be easy to sweep initiatives under the rug or turn to other efforts when you reach what seems like a standstill or roadblock. However, refining your processes is critical for setting your company up for success. Regardless of your situation, it’s important to properly address the key question, “Are we working on the right initiatives?” and adjust. Here, you can learn everything you need to know about assessing your initiatives and making changes to drive success. We’ll also express the importance of knowing when to quit and initiative and when to keep pushing through to see the expected results.
In This Article
- What Is an Initiative in Business?
- Assessing Your Business Initiatives — 4 Questions to Ask
- How Often Should You Review Strategic Initiatives?
- How to Quit Initiatives So You Can Focus on the Good Stuff
- How to Set Up Your What-to-Quit System
- Partner With AchieveIt for Strategy Execution
What Is an Initiative in Business?
Before evaluating your initiative targets and success, it’s essential to understand what business initiatives are and how you can refine them to accomplish your goals. Your strategic initiative definition will look different than that of another business. Generally, strategic initiatives refer to defined actions, activities or projects that empower you to achieve goals for long-term improvement. Initiatives are pathways to success detailing your vision and tasks to reach completion. These initiatives could encompass multiple projects or build on other initiatives to aid in achieving a large goal.
Strategic initiatives can take place at various company levels. Corporate-level initiatives target market-related goals, while business-level initiatives drive growth within a specific market. Functional-level initiatives take place within specific teams or departments. You can also categorize initiatives by their function. You may seek corrective initiatives to address an existing problem, expansive initiatives to integrate new approaches or methods, innovation initiatives to introduce breakthrough ideas and products or defense initiatives to maintain your current market position or business advantages.
Strategic initiative examples could be:
- Launching strategies to reduce outsourcing.
- Researching your next generation of product creation.
- Boosting brand awareness through social media campaigns.
- Supporting expansion plans by developing leadership.
- Providing more service or product offerings.
- Merging with critical suppliers.
- Implementing automation to reduce costs and enhance quality.
Assessing Your Business Initiatives — 4 Questions to Ask
Once you understand what your initiatives are, you can begin assessing their effectiveness and whether you need to make adjustments. Company initiatives should be measurable, align with your outcomes and show results within an appropriate time frame. Ask yourself these four questions when assessing your initiatives:
1. Do You Have Measurable Outcomes?
Does your plan have key performance indicators and/or measures, or does it resemble more of a to-do list?
Measurable outcomes are the key way to understand if your plan is working or not. Without benchmarks, you may have a plan that’s working properly — and be asking the wrong question altogether. Without any measurable outcomes, consider the several key metrics you discuss amongst your team, department or organization. Use these as the baseline metrics to measure your business against.
Internally at AchieveIt, we have it broken down by the organizational teams. Sales have targets related to increasing new business, finance has expense-related targets, marketing has targets focused on increasing our reach, engineering is focused on development schedules, and customer success is focused on growing our customer base. So, taking measurements each department deems important helps us establish a baseline to define key targets to measure against overall.
2. Have You Directly Aligned Your Initiatives With Your Outcomes?
If you do have quantifiable outcomes, the next question is to make sure your initiatives, activities and projects directly align with your outcomes.
Many people have a “Strategic” or “Business” plan with a separate “KPI scorecard” or another outside document. While this is fine and manageable in some businesses, many times, there are zero connection points between the document and the plan itself. You can see the fatal planning flaw. Why work on a ton of initiatives and projects if you aren’t even sure how they will impact your key performance indicators?
Instead, align your initiatives and projects directly with your outcomes. If a project doesn’t align with an outcome, decide whether the initiative is worth pursuing or if you are potentially missing a key measure. As you complete your key initiative, the outcome should start moving in the right direction.
3. Are You Completing Initiatives or Projects Without Seeing the Expected Results?
You may encounter situations where you’ve passed the first two questions but still aren’t seeing the results you hoped. At this point, it’s important to constructively criticize your plan and truly ask, “Are we working on the right initiatives?”
When you define initiatives and every single potential aspect that could influence your outcomes, you can better identify potential gaps in your plan. You may also spot opportunities you had previously considered but put on hold based on available time or resources.
For your organization, it’s critically important to identify the initiatives that aren’t working, but also those that are. In many cases, you can also align the resources, timelines, budget constraints and similar elements to increase this analysis. If you are spending a ton of time and money on initiatives that aren’t moving your outcomes in the right direction, don’t be afraid to pull the plug and apply those resources elsewhere. This is the key step in achieving the results you aim to achieve.
Having a quarterly or monthly conversation with your team allows you to analyze your plan and determine whether you’re aligned for success and measurable outcomes. The more and more frequently you have this discussion, the easier it will become to identify the key initiatives, projects, strategies and more to move your outcomes in the right direction.
4. Have You Given Enough Time for the Results to Occur?
In many situations, there is actually a fourth question to ask. There are some measures that simply take longer to react to activities, and it’s important to identify these metrics before abandoning successful initiatives and activities. While there is no perfect science for this question, you should consider this question to avoid abandoning activities too early when results are just around the corner.
How Often Should You Review Strategic Initiatives?
Now that you know how to assess your initiatives, it’s time to create a schedule for reviewing them. Generally, if you’re collecting updates with a regular cadence at all, you’re on the right track. There is no magic number because each business can create a unique update frequency that works for their organization.
However, there are baby steps you can take today to help you find the update frequency that works best for your organization. Depending on where you lie on the scale below, here are some ideas to help you reach the next level of efficacy in tracking and monitoring your plans:
Navigating Status Reporting
We all know metrics are the key to giving us a good scoreboard. Without knowing how we’re doing, we don’t know where to go. However, creating comprehensive reporting is daunting. It’s not uncommon to focus your sights too high-level (annual revenue) or too low-level (number of daily visitors to your website). Without an informative snapshot of some key metrics in between, your ability to make better decisions is a lost cause.
If you’re in this stage, take two steps back and look at the KPIs in your plan. When you report on your initiatives’ progress, ask for updates on each of those KPIs and stop there. Focus on those three to five metrics only. If, after a while, you decide including more measurements would be helpful, you can tack them onto your custom dashboard little by little instead of overwhelming your leadership team with too much information.
Taking a Long Time to Compile Status Reports
If you’re stuck in this stage, you’re in a war with spreadsheets known as “Excel Hell.” Many customers in this phase have tried various methods for gathering progress updates but haven’t quite nailed the process. Most have used some process that includes a combination of sending emails, updating an Excel document or taking screenshots to add to a PowerPoint — but most of the time-consuming activity stems from the classic chase-down-in-the-break-room technique to make sure people are providing the updates you need. Furthermore, this manual process takes so long to execute, that by the time you’ve neatly compiled the information into a digestible format, it’s already out of date. Not to mention the fact that manually inputting data from one document into another provides room for error, so the outdated information you’re looking at could also be inaccurate.
If you’re in this stage, in order to get timely, accurate data that allows you to understand how your organization is tracking toward your goals — start with assigning one person to provide updates for each item. No more, no less. Once that expectation is set, you can start to more frequently ask your team for progress updates, and it should take less and less time to compile the information you need to make decisions.
Learning to Pull Reports Regularly Alongside a Solid Reporting Structure
This stage is defined by an organization that knows who needs to pull what metrics and how they reflect growth, but you’re suffering from chronic inconsistency. If you’re like many others who fall prey to chronic inconsistency, you deprioritize status updates. Maybe you let a week go by on the due date. The next month, you may skip asking for updates because it seems like you’re still on track. By allowing your due dates to differ every time they come around, your ability to make proactive decisions disappears because the process doesn’t integrate into the workflow of your team.
Those suffering in this stage should implement a set cadence and stick to it. Whether you’re too frequent or infrequent, your cadence can be adjusted to fit the needs of your organization —but your biggest opportunity for success here is to keep your calendar unwavering, so you can rely on your data when you need it.
Upholding Status Update Meetings to Make Adjustments
Bingo, this is ideal. Whether you’re checking the status of your most important initiatives and assessing them quarterly, monthly or even bi-weekly, your set cadence should help your accountable parties provide the metrics you need to make better decisions. If you still need to adjust between those best practice update cadences, ask yourself some questions. Are you surprised by the updates you’re seeing at each check-in? Maybe increase the frequency of reporting. If the metric you’re tracking is trending more quickly in between monthly updates, for instance, start to check in bi-weekly and see if that provides the fluctuation insight you’re looking for. Are your numbers pretty much staying the same? If you’re meeting monthly and your big target growth numbers don’t seem to be moving, try adjusting your updates to take place further apart — quarterly.
Sometimes, a little perspective can help you spot trends over time. However, don’t fall into the trap of asking for updates less frequently just because it’s easier on those providing metrics. If you wait too long in between updates, you could lose insight in lieu of hindsight, which doesn’t give you enough time or agility to adapt.
How to Quit Initiatives So You Can Focus on the Good Stuff
Determining whether you’re working toward the right initiatives is crucial for your business, but what happens if you decide you’ve been targeting the wrong ones? If you avoid a faulty plan tracking system, you can easily spot and quit the initiatives that aren’t panning out, and invest time and effort in rising up to define your key differentiators.
Take pride in knowing your decisions to quit are actually a healthy form of resource management and innovation. Actually getting key initiatives across the finish line is only made possible by sometimes deciding, let’s not actually do this.
Make “Quit” a Good Word
That’s right. I said it. Quit.
The word “quit” and the act of doing so have such a unique place in our culture. We’re taught from a very young age that quitting is essentially bad and has no place in our society. Remember those motivational posters lining the walls of your elementary school classroom? “Winners never quit, and quitters never win,” with some cheesy picture of a baseball player or skydivers or something — right next to the one with the kitten dangling from a branch shouting, “Hang in there!”
But winners do quit — they just quit the right stuff at the right time. Winners exude as little effort as possible on areas that have little to no impact. This means if you actually quit what you’re not-so-great at, you can make more room to really invest in your key differentiators.
Once we’re able to move past the cultural faux pas of quitting, we start to realize how important it is when it comes to building a healthy change management mindset.
Start the conversation in your organization to try and dissipate the general terror surrounding being seen as a quitter. Highlight instances where appropriate time management has led to big wins, even if it meant dropping other initiatives down on the priority list. Your team has to see it to believe it.
A Brief Explanation of the Quitters’ Landscape
When you start something new, excitement is high, investment and attention are oh-so-focused, and ultimately, it’s fun to work on. You’re learning very quickly and seeing fast results.
Eventually, your growth slows. You realize how far you have left to go to reach your goals. You become less engaged.
Then the paperwork and tedium hit. Your new initiative or goal becomes more of a chore and less of a hobby. It’s the difference between learning to make a good pancake once and being able to make perfect pancakes every time.
When you hit this point, you’ve reached The Dip – a sieve that filters out “The Greats.” The people who make it to the other side are few and far between — and that’s why they’re “The Greats.”
However, those who never quit when they should end up at a dead end — The Cul-De-Sac. Teams that just keep saying yes become over-operationalized and over-worked, leading to constant work where nothing gets worse or better while taking your time, budget and innovation from initiatives that could really set you apart. While pushing through challenges can be rewarding, you need to recognize which risks provide the opportunity to win and push out of the Dip, and which initiatives are keeping you from doing other more valuable things.
Maybe, Let’s Not Actually Do This
The Dip and the Cul-De-Sac are so important in plan execution. We spend so much time crafting and fine-tuning our strategy that we forget our plans are essentially a series of bets we’re making about the future.
We don’t have a crystal ball. Without the luxury of being able to see into the future, we have to accept that some of the bets we make aren’t going to pay out the way we thought they might — but we don’t know which ones. However, we can still multiply our investments by focusing on the things that will push up and out of the Dip, and forget the plates we’re spinning on the Cul-De-Sac that are stealing energy away from developing our true differentiators.
Instead of classifying “losing a bet” on an initiative that isn’t showing results as a failure of our personal character, we should embrace it — and then quit. Remove our pride along with the resources backing the initiative, and double down on one of the bets that is shaping up to be a winner.
There are a couple of things you can do as a plan leader to help start to cultivate the idea of subtraction as a good, necessary and healthy part of a change-oriented mindset. i.e., You need to diminish the stigma and set up a system so you can easily see what to quit.
How to Set Up Your What-to-Quit System
You likely collect plan updates on a spreadsheet with a column dedicated to something that indicates status. AchieveIt (though absolutely better for plan leaders than a spreadsheet) uses a couple of default statuses to give the overview of the initiative line item: On Track, Off Track, At Risk, Achieved, Not Achieved and Canceled.
You’ve got to use these statuses truthfully.
Because quitting feels like an unnatural defiance of our American values, we’re more likely to mark something “Off Track” and deprioritize the project that isn’t currently working out — just so we don’t have to wear the scarlet letter Q on our chests.
We keep kind of working on it, but it’s stuck in the Cul-De-Sac, taking up mental space and hanging over our heads like a heavy cloud of guilt. These plans become known as “watermelons” because they’re green on the outside and red on the inside, i.e., everything looks great on the surface, but there’s a lot of trouble in certain places. Watermelons are dangerous because you don’t know where your real issues are, what to quit or where to invest. This fear to mark something At Risk, Not Achieved or Canceled dooms us to a life that lacks the clear focus we need to stay ahead in a chaotic and competitive market.
It’s actually better for you and your team to ignore the sunk costs on those projects you can’t — and more importantly, shouldn’t — turn around, quit them, mark them Canceled and move forward with the bets that are materializing to make the organization better.
This is why at AchieveIt, we constantly praise our customers who have items within their plans with a Not Achieved or Canceled status, rather than all On Track or Achieved. These businesses use AchieveIt to actively evaluate and adjust their bets based on the results they’re seeing, in real-time.
Partner With AchieveIt for Strategy Execution
At AchieveIt, you can find a comprehensive platform to build plans, manage progress, assess performance and achieve more. Our solution empowers leaders to focus their attention on critical metrics and actions while enhancing communication and efficiency. AchieveIt allows users to formulate strategies by leveraging data and unique organizational processes and plans.
Are you ready to achieve more with your strategic initiatives? Request a demo to see our solution in action.
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