How to determine whether your strategy design and execution process is flawed

Stacey Barr, in her article “Improving Strategy With A Better Measurement Approach”, gives some useful tips on how a better performance measurement process like PuMP can be integrated into the three subprocesses of the strategy design and execution or strategic performance management process, i.e. strategy design, strategy alignment and strategy execution. But before you integrate PuMP into your strategy design and execution process, the sequencing of the steps in your process must be logical.

This is how I developed a model for strategy design and execution that has logical sequencing of steps:

First, I designed Level 1 process flowcharts for each process in strategy design and execution. What I noticed was that some steps of strategy design were the same as those for the monitoring subprocess in strategy execution. Even the last step in monitoring, Advice ( or recommendation for action), was about finding new change initiatives, where necessary,  to keep performance on track. In essence, monitoring is an iteration of the Select KPIs & Set Targets and Identify Initiatives steps of strategy design.

Second, I merged the strategy design, alignment and execution process flow charts to create one flow chart and then eliminated repetitive steps. I ended up with an integrated process with four stages – DESIGN, REPORT, DECIDE & IMPROVE – illustrated in the above model.

The main revelations in this exercise were:

• Monitoring (which I renamed to Report because it is but a performance reporting process) follows Strategy Design and is a repetitive step after Implementation (Improve). Thus, the normal sequencing of strategy design and execution steps, which begin with strategy formulation (or design) followed by implementation and then monitoring, is flawed.
• After the cascading step (Develop Goals & Align), strategy alignment follows the steps in the strategy design and execution process’s Report, Decide and Improve stages.

Does this model make sense to you? How can it be improved?