Performance Controller

"However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results"...WC Print

As large companies continue to consolidate and look at ways to rationalize they inevitably focus to cut out the middle man. The falling out of Singapore International Airlines with one of their major agents, Flight Centre in Australia, tells the story of this type of change.

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“Stepping outside of your comfort zone can trigger the pump. The natural response to being on unfamiliar ground is to expect the worst. However, consider data you have to hand to help you determine just how much you need to be concerned.

If it is disaster you anticipate, just imagine the event as one that simply challenges this concern and as something your cautious side tells you to consider?

Weighing up the evidence will either support conservative steps you really should take, or it give you a view that shows the usual dips and flows you might reasonably expect”.

This is an excerpt from a contribution by Nada Mills, a notable Australian organizational behavior management specialist and clinical psychologist, living in Perth. Recently retired from full time practice and devoting time to writing, she says “gathering evidence is vital to keeping your eye on the prize’

We are facing a world where the traditional organisation structures and boundaries of control, as we know them  are light speeding to new paradigms. Unprecedented business intelligence power and band width means it is inevitable we will see a multilevel approach. With economics pressures so high, the concept to reality time compression crunch may be sooner rather than later. In Gary Cokins insights in his What is the Best Organization Chart for Performance Management? it is clear already business leaders see systems able to allow the customer to become the “Boss.” And ultimately being accountable for performance decisions that threatens traditional supply chain management processes as the very concept of today’s middle management evaporates.

Nada Mills now plans a series of discussion papers on Decision Making in the un-relenting high risky change of these new paradigms. The decisions and changes ahead are far reaching and may be way beyond the vision or capability of many who will sadly be caught in the fall out of the change this heralds. The obligation as advisors, is to move to cover that gap.

These will be published in this forum and will focus on the decision environment where supply and demand and business processes are reincarnating in ever shorter and shorter cycles. Aimed at understanding the likely fall out of major shifts in behaviors they will frame discussion and thought around best practice approaches on understanding the problem and effective handling of the constant of change itself.

To downloaded her papers ongoing I recommend you subscribe to the RSS feed at www.PerformanceController.com If you would like to contribute, please submit/register or make request via the comments on this section in this web page.

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An organization has diverse objectives that often seem unrelated to the business goal and focused only on departmental missions. Without clear strategic mission alignment and control linked to the business processes, parochial and silo thinking pervades.

 

Forming and managing strategy requires formal alignment of business process activities to business goal. 

 

In a supply chain the processes deliverables are the assembly of all the relevant activity outputs. In the strategy management process it is the similar with combined result of the various related activities used to achieve each strategic goal.

 

Hence to achieve Business Growth, “Product Marketing” and “Sales” activities in the right order and mix of energy will produce the best “Sales order” outcome” This in turn may also require other underpinning activities such as “Customer Service” aimed at quality and retention to achieve the business objective.

 

Strategy planning cannot be done in isolation.  If the whole organisation is not considered, then completing resources may be parochially assigned to actually negate the objective. For example an IT 100% up-time for all systems globally may be a primary mission objective. But that may not actually reflect the priority and reality or changing strategic needs of the business.

 

In a strategic management approach priority to reassign IT people to ensure a marketing system has uptime priority only at peak times, when it is needed, may serve better than maintaining an always ready state. Conversely IT resources may be better placed to add a business intelligence capability for target market planning so the marketing system can achieve higher penetration when programs are run.

 

Effective management reaction of the strategy contributing activities is also key. A routine activity and outcomes and results review to relative contribution weightings shows low contributing activities that need to be cut and where others may be re prioritized to achieve maximum bang for the buck with more certainty.

 

Outcomes achieved in the following table which shows a strategy for growth that involves a number of departmental activates. The original plan executed was change as the contribution mix showed it could get that same outcome by reducing low contribution activates. In this case increasing direct client contact yields the required results so allowing the advertising program to be cut.

 

 

Responsibility	Weight		Result
	Plan	Actual	Plan	Actual	Variance
Grow Existing Business	100.0%	100.0%	30%	31%	103%
Activity Marketing
TV Advertising slots	50.0%	48.4%	4	3	50%
Sales
Tele-sales calls	30.0%	225.8%	3000	7000	233%
Major accounts calls	10.0%	174.2%	100	180	180%
Customer Service
Re-training people	10.0%	9.7%	30	3	10%

 

In a typical organization strategy planning template you can see the matrix is are oriented to business strategies rather than departmental goals. In this way management can set strategy and then ask service department to plan activity to achieve them.

 

Function	Department	Strategic Goals
		Increased Operation Effectiveness 0f 10%	Sales Growth Of 25%	30% Market  Share		Sales Margin Up 3%
Performance Control
	Management
	Planning
	Compliance
	Governance
Relationship Management
	Marketing
	Sales
Operations
	Production
	Customer Service
Finance & Admin Services
	Customer Accounting
	Compliance Accounting
	Management Accounting
Information Services
Hunan & Contract Services

From functional perspectives, contributions to each strategy can vary in terms of activity outputs with common outcomes or results the measure of success. Just like a supply chain process, silos are flattened and common objectives are aligned.

 

 

 

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