Adopting a strategic management approach is more than just a set of rules to follow. It would help if you had strategic and process-oriented thinking and the ability to communicate your company's vision and goals globally and in an understandable way. Only then you and your team can innovate and grow. Suppose you’ve read some of our previous articles (Working in a context, not control environment, and Turning to strategic management). In that case, you already know we are obsessed with performance, work-transparency, and providing the right context to employees.
We already mentioned how we use Kaplan and Norton's Balanced Scorecard (BSC) to connect the main dots in our strategy. We combine in with using JIRA so we can manage our projects, and today we will try to explain the processes around executing strategy-driven tasks more thoroughly.
Kaplan and Norton's Balanced Scorecard
The Balanced Scorecard is a strategic performance measurement model, developed by Robert Kaplan and David Norton, which at Secure Group we use to visualize and communicate our company's mission and vision into actual objectives and goals.
In our previous article, you can check the main points for providing context through the BSC within our company.
The model allows us to view our company from four primary perspectives (Financial, Customer/Stakeholder, Internal Process and Learning and Growth) and connect the dots between our overall strategy, such as:
- Mission: our purpose
- Vision: what we aspire to
- Core values: what we believe in
- Strategic focus areas: themes, results, and goals
And the more tactical operational elements, such as:
- Objectives: continuous improvement activities
- Measures: KPIs to track strategic performance
- Targets: our desired level of performance
- Initiatives: projects that help us reach our targets
To provide even more visibility about how we built our strategy, here is some more explanation on the four main perspectives:
Financial perspective
At Secure Group, the financial perspective isn't something we view as essential only for upper management and stakeholders, as it is vital for the overall business growth. It is a quantitative benchmark, which we calculate based on financial figures from previous years and provides insight into our Operations department about our strategy's stability.
Customer/Stakeholder perspective
This perspective is all about our partners, end-users, and stakeholders, which allows us to determine the quality, price, overall service, and acceptable margin, determined by our target group.
Internal Processes perspective
The internal processes perspective allows us to understand what value we bring to our products and customers and sharp shoot the activities and processes that need to be optimized, implemented, or taken out.
Learning and Growth perspective
We always say that our employees are the backbone of Secure Group, as, without them, we wouldn't be able to develop and market our solutions. The Learning and Growth perspective makes sure employees can continually improve their skills and grow their expertise by providing them with the right context, tools, and processes.
Each department at Secure Group has its strategic map and balanced scorecard, which allows us to align our tasks and projects with our objectives and goals. Employees can prioritize and execute tasks on their own without the need for micromanagement.
Ensuring strategic execution with Jira
Adopting strategic management also made us replace the traditional working model with agile working practices in our development teams and all other departments. With this in mind, JIRA allowed us to create visual workflows, dashboards, and everything we need to customize and simplify our project flows.
All our tasks are distributed in JIRA and linked to each department's strategic map's business goals. We can track who is contributing to each goal and which initiatives we need to implement or take out.
All employee interactions are aligned with the strategy and goals, rather than tactics, which helps us allocate all our resources in the right places and be more productive.
By adopting these working practices, we can make our overall business strategy and goals clear and understood company-wide, which allows all employees to contribute and focus their resources towards ensuring the quality of our products and providing security in all aspects.
If you have a champion-like mindset and want to work on products that make an impact, make sure to take a look at our open positions, as we are always looking for bright minds.
Comments