What Does the Strategy & Operations Role Do?

Anyone job searching has seen listings for strategy & operations [S&O] positions. Typically, these positions call for senior experienced people with a strong grasp of business, business operations and strategy development. Organizations rely on strategy to provide structured direction and operations to ensure that we are delivering on that plan. The S&O team ensures an effective collaborative marriage between those activities to deliver long-term and short-term goals, requiring aligned efforts between finances, production operations, sales/marketing, supply chain, offering development, and other supporting services.

The role title is expansive, seemingly covering the entirety of everything that drives a business. Having served as Head of S&O for one of Google Search engineering organizations, I can affirm that the role is fast paced, challenging and demanding. However, it is not all things strategy and operations. Rather, the S&O effort provides a framework for facilitating leadership decision-making by providing curated, rapidly digestible intelligence at the moment of its greatest need.

The effort requires a chaotic dance between driving a structured cadence and flexing toward emerging, disruptive discoveries, challenges and opportunities, packaging it in an elegant way that separates the signal from the noise. That sounds messy, and it is. But if managed deftly, most days, we can orchestrate delivering the right information to the right people at the right time.

In my article, “Supporting High Stakes decision-making,” I cover how to queue up and refine information for executive review to support decision-making. While the approach applies to the intelligence promoted for executive review through the S&O effort, I won’t repeat it here. Rather, we will focus on the broad scope covered by the S&O lead / team. The previous article makes a great companion to this article and is a short read.

The S&O effort focuses on facilitating activities that answer the questions most critical to the organization’s success.

• What should our strategy be?
• What are our strategic priorities?
• What should we tackle now?
• What are our performance targets?
• How are we performing against our major commitments?
• Where should we focus our resources, and what types of resources are required?
• How are we performing against our budget and other constraints?
• Is the culture that we have in place eliciting the behaviors we need to progress in our strategic direction?
• What are our emerging strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats?
• Where and when might we need to pivot?

If the S&O effectively curates the available body of information into focused intelligence, organizational leadership will be well prepared to answer these questions.

What is the S&O’s scope?

As with any operational mechanism, the S&O scope is customized to the needs of the organization. However, there are a few common aspects that typically reside within the S&O.

• Facilitating Strategy Creation & Refreshes
• Performance Tracking & Monitoring
• Managing the Rhythm of Business
• Leadership Consulting

Facilitating Strategy Creation & Refreshes

Organizational success and priorities are fostered by its strategic direction. Effectively setting that direction is the highest priority of the S&O. After all, it is in the name. I summarized how to develop a robust strategy and its key components in my article, “Crafting a Living Strategy”. If you want to read about what makes a good strategy I highly recommend reading that article. Here we will focus on the tactics of facilitating the creation or refresh.

While the strategy development process is fairly straightforward, strategy development is one of the most difficult efforts to facilitate. Strategy development is about reaching into a vague future while making predictions with our organization’s future at stake. The stakes could not be higher. Those engaged in the effort will disagree both on what the future will bring and the organization’s position to take advantage of that future. Executives are not positioned for their diminutiveness or compliance in any situation. Those executives will have an opinion when making these big calls on strategy. . Even the most well-behaved and collaborative executives are likely to come to loggerheads. Regardless of whether or not differences become intractable, conflict should arise as a healthy aspect of debate around organizational positioning and trajectory. That means that when facilitating strategy development, we must plan for conflict and facilitate it to be limited and constructive at each stage of development.

Regardless of the method used — collaborative documents, 1:1 meetings, executive reviews, etc. — following the above four-step approach avoids unresolved conflicts and limits leadership meetings to align on the state of the organization and ecosystem. We can use this conflict resolution approach for each phase of strategy development.

Gathering Intelligence — In order to develop a successful strategy, executives need to understand the current and projected future state, grounded in four areas:

• Our ecosystem macro-trends include economics, politics, technology, regulatory, etc. We need to understand the big movements to plan how to position ourselves to deal with them.
• Market and industry trends to understand customer demand shifts, untapped market opportunities, competition positioning, and the macro-trends’ and industry-specific impacts.
• The strengths and weaknesses of our internal position include the performance of our current offerings, known offering gaps, infrastructure conditions to meet our business model demands, and resource position to meet current and future demands.
• The performance trends of our offering development and demand driving and fulfillment efforts.

This information is gathered from academic and industry expert white papers, professional market and industry analysis, and internal position and performance data. Even if this captured information is focused on providing enlightenment in the areas of our greatest concern, it will be voluminous and sprawling for decision makers to digest. The information must be curated to ensure that the delivered intelligence is rapidly digested and provides for alignment.

Analyzing and Packaging — Translating the gathered intelligence requires curation, packaging the intelligence in a way that highlights the key aspects of that intelligence, allows the interested reader to dive into the details beyond the headline if they desire, and identifies topics for additional discussion, investigation, and ‘truths that should be cannon.’ By ‘truths that should be cannon, I mean facts and beliefs upon which we make our fundamental operating assumptions.

The inherent danger of this curation effort is that it is prone to editorial bias. When I perform this sort of curation, I prefer to either perform it in parallel with another analyst and compare notes to finalize the analysis, or generate the analysis along with my assumptions for deriving the positions and share it first with a set of critical analysts who will ensure all delivered positions are thoroughly scrubbed and critiqued.

Proposing and Aligning on the Strategic Elements — As we settle on the strategic direction and implications for change to the business model, functional leaders, if we are planning at the enterprise level, need to assess implications for their arena of responsibility and define the changes required to adjust the demand driving and fulfillment efforts, and well as offering development and support functions. Those become the big building blocks of the updated strategy. Once those changes are defined, they and their implications for other functions must be aligned across the organization. We are adding detail to the general strategic direction. As we do so, we will unearth additional disconnects between the functions. Conflict resolution will become more specific.

Establishing the Priorities & Performance Targets — To make our changes meaningful and meet the demands of our strategy, we need to prioritize quantitatively by assessing the work that we do to bridge the gap between where we are and where we need to be. We do that by first setting key performance indicator [KPI] targets and then assessing each strategy-driven effort in terms of contribution to those targets. Now, we are getting very specific, and the leadership disagreements will be just as specific. The metrics and KPI targets provide the guidance for the valuation of the proposed solutions associated with the commitments we are about to make.

Making Next Term Commitments — Now that we have laid out our adjusted strategy, the general road map, and targets, we need to commit to the initial work ahead. Typically, organizations complete strategy adjustments annually. If that’s the case, we will likely generate commitments for the upcoming year. The commitments come in the form of “we will deliver these offerings to this customer segment by year’s end” or “we will deliver this enterprise / function capability by year’s end.” To set expectations for the delivery of these commitments, we also establish the KPI target for that capability. These highly specific commitments drive the organization’s efforts for the coming year.

Strategy development is a multi-month process that we schedule on a cadence. While critical to organizational success, it is an annual project with a beginning and an end. The next two S&O activities — performance tracking and monitoring, and managing operational cadence — are year-around ongoing operational activities.

Performance Tracking & Monitoring

There is a term we live by in the operations world — what is measured is improved. In the context of S&O that means identifying the handful of KPIs that track broad organizational performance. There is no one generic set of indicators that are common to all organizations. Of course, there are the standard financial KPIs such as revenue and profit margin. But the others will be dictated by the organization’s strategy in the realms of customer / client demand, ability to fill that demand, new offerings and capabilities including their impact on the top and bottom lines, and support services performance.

Regardless of what KPIs are the right version for your organization, they need to be monitored in a way that prompts leadership actions and informs leadership decision-making. We typically provide that monitoring function by getting agreement on what that handful of KPIs are and developing a metric driven dashboard.

There is art in constructing an effective dashboard. My goal is for an experienced [with the dashboard] leader to assess general organizational performance and identify areas of concern within two minutes. I have thrown them together quickly, and I have worked with data scientists for months to optimize visual effectiveness and automate the backend. Regardless of how we put together a dashboard, it should be rapidly digestible and prompt executive response to both underperformance and overperformance.

The job is not done by simply delivering the dashboard. While the dashboard is critical for executive assessment, once a leader has reviewed it and assessed areas for action, they will want to dive into the details. Whether the leader can click into the dashboard for detailed views or we have manual supporting documentation, we need to provide a leader with a path into that needed detail. Additionally, we must ensure a formal review cadence to maintain organizational alignment on operational performance. For that we need to discuss the Rhythm of Business.

Managing the Rhythm of Business

I covered the rhythm of business in some detail in my “Supporting High Stakes decision-making”. I will provide a summary here. Rhythm of business encapsulates the concept of identifying all of the intelligence that a leadership team needs to be on top of and establishes a framing and schedule for updating the leadership team with this intelligence. That cadence provides updates in a number of areas that takes into account both what information needs to be delivered, in what form, and how often it will be reviewed. The schedule takes into account when that intelligence will be available. For example, some financial data is only updated quarterly. It would be pointless to review that information more frequently than each quarter. Some of the common areas of review include:

Budget Reviews — Reviewing revenue and spending for the last period to determine if adjustments need to be made.

Resource Allocation Reviews — Reviewing where our people are allocated. Understanding this allocation is interesting by itself. However, its real value manifests as part of performance monitoring. Flagging performance may require shifting people around to shore up performance.

KPI Monitoring — This is the dashboard review we discussed above to assess the organization’s operational performance. This review allows us to understand how well we are doing with our current capabilities.

Strategic Commitments Tracking — Our last step in developing the strategy is to establish commitments for the things we will accomplish to bridge the gap between where we are and where we need to be. These commitments typically result in programs that deliver new offerings and new operational capabilities. Tracking these programs is a critical part of ensuring our future.

Offering Development and Operational Solutioning Program Reviews — Beyond the high-level commitment performance reviews, leadership members associated with specific programs. Typically, offering development is associated with permanent engineering and product management teams within the engineering function. So these “functional” reviews are fairly straightforward, populated with members that have long-term relationships, and are often structured within an organizational function. Capability delivery programs tend to be assembled based on the scope of capability being delivered. The teams are ‘temporary’, even if the program will take multiple years to complete. Ultimately, the team members will be ingested back into their respective organizations upon program completion. Thus the program structure and review cadence will be custom to that program.

Portfolio Management — I cover portfolio management extensively in my “The Heart of the Value Delivery Machine — The PMO” article, assigning ownership to the PMO. In reality, portfolio management can be owned by either the PMO or the S&O. Regardless of who ‘owns’ it, the S&O and the PMO share the responsibility for managing the portfolio. The S&O typically facilitates the valuation criteria we discussed above, establishing the KPI targets and then valuing each proposed solution against its contribution to those KPI targets. The PMO manages the programs that deliver the solutions and regularly evaluates the program development to determine whether or not the delivered solution will meet the projected value for the proposed solution, proposing portfolio changes for efforts that are falling short.

Rhythm of Business Cadence — With that set of efforts identified, we now need to schedule all of these efforts in a way that keeps organization leadership updated with the freshest available intelligence. The schedule below is a mock rhythm of business cadence.

A well managed rhythm of business cadence results in an informed and aligned leadership.

Leadership Consulting

The S&O efforts outlined above are at the highest levels of the organization, including the organization’s senior leadership. Individual leaders and their direct reports, often have to mirror those efforts at their functional level or build supporting structures to feed the top-level efforts. For example, for software platform development, the data center organization needs to develop its own data center strategy, support the organization’s grand strategy, and feed performance updates into the rhythm of business. Leadership consulting steps into that gap.

In essence, leadership consulting assists and coaches leaders within the organization in structuring performance in all the areas that we have discussed. It is the equivalent of hiring an external consultant but with someone who intimately understands the organization, the leader’s needs, and the implications of their work on the rest of the organization.

The Takeaways

Organizations rely on strategy to provide structured direction and operations to ensure that we are delivering on that plan. The S&O team ensures an effective collaborative marriage between those activities to deliver long-term and short-term goals, requiring aligned efforts between finances, production operations, sales/ marketing, supply chain, offering development, and other supporting services. The role is fast-paced, challenging and demanding. The S&O effort provides a framework for facilitating leadership decision-making by providing curated, rapidly digestible intelligence at the moment of its greatest need.

The S&O effort focuses on facilitating activities that answer the questions most critical to the organization’s success.

• What should our strategy be?
• What are our strategic priorities?
• What should we tackle now?
• What are our performance targets?

How are we performing against our major commitments?

• Where should we focus our resources, and what types of resources are required?
• How are we performing against our budget and other constraints?
• Is the culture that we have in place eliciting the behaviors we need to progress in our strategic direction?
• What are our emerging strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats?

Where and when might we need to pivot?

If the S&O effectively curates the available body of information into focused intelligence, organizational leadership will be well prepared to answer these questions.

The scope of the S&O may include:

Facilitating Strategy Creation & Refreshes — Facilitating strategy creation or refreshes is a multi-month process which includes gathering intelligence, analyzing the information and packaging it for review, proposing and aligning on the strategic elements, establishing the priorities and performance targets, and making next term commitments. This process will raise conflicting points of view in each step. The effort must be structured to capture and manage those conflicts.

Performance Tracking & Monitoring — Identifying the organization’s KPIs and establishing the performance dashboard in a form that allows for an ‘instant’ understanding of the organization’s performance position. Once the dashboard and collateral detail are structured, establish a review cadence.

Rhythm of Business Cadence — Facilitated cadence schedule that keeps organization leadership updated with the freshest available intelligence.

Leadership Consulting — Coaching and assistance to organizational leaders to support their strategy and operations efforts in alignment with the enterprise level S&O.

Find more articles from Sarah at: www.operations-architect.com.