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What does your organization risk by not achieving all of your initiatives?

Trying to track a process improvement, strategic, or cost reduction plan from a spreadsheet is labor-intensive, error-prone, and makes it hard to see progress from a higher level. The monitoring process isn’t easy, so over time, insight into important initiatives dwindles. Employees give up on executing plans with no accountability.

What if you achieved every one of your goals?

The dollars you plan to gain and save in each of your initiatives is the cost of poor plan governance.

Download this guide and the companion calculator worksheet to show your team what you’re leaving on the table without enabling plan visibility, organizational alignment, or automated accountability – and what you stand to gain with a better solution.

We’ve all used it. And we all know better.

Excel, SharePoint and Smartsheet just don’t solve the execution gap. If you need the swift kick in the pants to finally do something to make your life easier and your plan more effective – you’ve found the guide that will shock you into action.

If you’ve come this far in looking for a solution to your problems, you don’t need convincing that using spreadsheets to keep track of complicated initiatives is a headache. But, do you know the hidden costs and dangers of sticking with the status quo?

If you think it may be “more complicated than it’s worth” to implement, train and adapt to using a new software, do you know what you’re really risking by continuing to use a spreadsheet? (Hint: The error rate alone will make you second guess everything you’ve ever tracked in Excel.)

Don’t let another month go by where you spend hours pestering people for updates, reading through emails from contributors and pulling data into an error-prone spreadsheet to export it to a graph to put into a PowerPoint to show the Board of Directors information that, by the time they see it, will already be out of date. Seriously, stop doing this to yourself.

In this guide, you will learn:

• The not-so-obvious dangers of staying with the status quo
• Next steps to take towards flexible and agile organizational planning
• What to look for in a plan execution reporting and management tool
• A comparison of Excel to specialized plan execution software

As a strategy professional, you’ve developed your own system for checking off all the boxes along the strategy creation path. But if your organization is like most, strategy execution continues to be an uphill battle.

This struggle has been well-documented; according to Harvard Business Review, 75% of organizations struggle to implement strategy, and according to The Economist, only 2% of leaders are confident that they’ll achieve 80-100% of their strategy’s objectives.

It’s painful to realize that most organizations will fall short of their goals. However, you have the opportunity to set yourself apart and lead your organization to success. To become part of this empowered group, you need to engage the four drivers of strategy execution.

In this guide, you will learn:

• The most common barriers to execution
• The cost of poor strategy execution
• How to develop a system that enables the four drivers

Download Four Stages to Creating a Strategy Execution Culture to learn how to build an organizational culture that amplifies execution and results.

The ability to effectively execute is the critical key in turning vision into reality. Plan poorly, and market forces are likely to crush you. Execute poorly, and results are far worse.

Creating an organizational culture of execution can have profound impacts on results, but it doesn’t happen overnight. An organization must make its way through each of the four stages of cultural transformation. Then, it must hardwire the tools that allow execution to become the cultural norm.

In this guide, you will learn:

• 4 stages of cultural transformation
• How to identify which stage your organization is in
• Tools and changes required to progress through each stage
• 5 tips to hardwire a culture of execution and innovation

Durability and actionability must underscore your agenda. Put simply, the focus has shifted from setting goals to managing and achieving them.

In this white paper, you will learn:

• 5 best practices for effective goal setting
• Common strategic goal-setting pitfalls
• Which goal-setting methodology is right for your organization
• Strategies for rallying employees around new goals
• How to start improving execution

Strategic and operation plans have immense potential value, yet most organizations fail to tap into that value. The reason? A failure to effectively implement them.

The excitement generated during planning retreats rarely translates into execution.

Why does this happen? And what can you do to prevent it from happening to your organization?

In this white paper, you will learn:

• The root cause of poor strategy execution
• Two execution secrets for accelerating business results
• One rule to create measurable and quantifiable objectives
• The key components of effective plan review and monitoring

The Execution Flywheel is a methodology for organizations that compete in aggressive markets, markets in decline, or ones experiencing stagnant growth. Organizations in these situations have to find ways to increase quality or service while also reducing costs. Improving strategy execution is paramount.

Download this guide, The Execution Flywheel, to gain a deeper understanding of how this specific methodology can bulletproof the development of your plan and provide a timeline that emphasizes execution.

In this guide, you will learn:

• The 6 phases of the Execution Flywheel Methodology
• A timeline that increases your ability to execute well
• How to implement processes that encourage continuous improvement
• Critical components in timing your strategic plan
• How to leverage technology to start improving strategy execution

Most organizations today develop some sort of operational or strategic plan with the intention of achieving results. However, the vast majority of those plans fail to produce their desired outcomes, and organizations often can’t identify where they’re going wrong.

In this white paper, you will learn:

• A six-phase approach to elevating your strategic planning process
• 4 rules to bulletproof your strategic plan
• 2 primary reasons strategic plans fail and how to avoid them
• How to evaluate strategic planning solutions

It’s no secret that executives crave visibility. And all too often, on your mission to keep reporting and executive summary dashboards clean and concise, even the best intentioned dashboards can become cluttered, overwhelming and tedious. The process of keeping the dashboards populated with accurate information is just as important as the dashboards themselves and especially difficult if you’re trying to do them in spreadsheets.

In this guide, you will learn:

• Five common mistakes to avoid when creating data visualizations.
• Best practices for designing executive summary dashboards.
• Tips for leveraging technology to create, track, and update your dashboards in real-time.

Strategic dashboards are a great “at-a-glance” tool to help leaders make informed, data-driven decisions. Your dashboards should create an insightful and succinct story around the success of your key initiatives; however, in an attempt to track everything, organizations often create an environment with no strategic focus.

In this guide, you will learn:

• Reasons why your dashboards may not be effective.
• How to create results-oriented dashboards.
• Steps to right-sizing your strategic dashboards.