Strategic advice

Significant benefits can be accrued from the pragmatic application of structured techniques to ensure the programme is strategically aligned to, and directly supports, the organisation's overall aims and objectives. This alignment is one of the major benefits of adopting a structured approach at programme initiation stage and decreases the chance of embarrassing failures or delays.

• Establish a thorough and robust understanding of the "as-is" position.
• Obtain independent and objective perspectives to assess and test the "vision" of the programme.
• Define a pragmatic roadmap for addressing the gaps between the "as-is" and " to-be" situation.
• Seek out "challenge" functions to test the robustness of your approach.
• Keep the organisation in the driving seat and in control of its affairs by engaging people who can fit in as part of your team and work together to achieve the agreed programme goals.
• Use the organisation's strategies as a "springboard".
• Share ideas with other organisations tackling a similar challenge, even if different from your own, and obtain powerful insights into how your roadmap and strategy should look.
• Remember that sound strategies and roadmaps are usually easy to communicate - diagrams and simple presentations are the right tools, but get creative input to put the messages together.
• Build in flexibility when setting the direction - standard tools include adapting the rate of change (serial or parallel paths), flexing the delivery mechanism (e.g. internal, external, partnership) and appropriate use of options and priorities.
• Take a broad-based view - a robust strategy should make sense from the perspective of all major stake-holders, including staff, management, customers, partners, regulators and suppliers.
• Don't underestimate the challenge of developing a clear and actionable blueprint to convert the programme's vision into reality (i.e. delivery) - one that the programme team and stake-holders can understand.