Strategic Alignment to Harmonize Business Execution

Strategic alignment is more as a result rather than a process. 

From Wikipedia: Strategic alignment is the process and the result of linking the organizational strategy and its objectives with every unit and employee. Alignment is for this reason also needed between units/business functions.

• Strategic alignment is the process of creating sub-goals at the departmental level from the main corporate goal, that all support the achievement of the main goal. How do you actually align the organization to best carry out the vision? It is one thing to spend hours on vision and strategy, but quite another to make structural changes that may be necessary to really see it through effectively. The top-down answer is when business operations are an efficient execution of the strategic intent; the bottom-up answer is when people are inspired and enabled in work that advances the strategic intent.

• Strategic alignment is the process of ensuring all organization action is directed to achieving common strategic goals and objectives. Basically, there is the main corporate goal. From this goal, you determine certain "action items." These action items become goals for business units. The business units determine action items from these goals, and these action items become the goals of the departments within each business unit. And so on, until each individual manager or supervisor has a goal, with action items and opposing metrics

• Strategic alignment is more as a result rather than a process. Are your processes functioning to deliver results consistent with the strategic intent? Are your people acting in a way that is consistent with the strategy? Are your processes and people integrated to ensure a consistent ability to deliver customer value as defined in the strategy? If you can answer yes to these questions you have alignment. If not you have to identify which of the Strategy, Processes, and People elements are out of alignment and fix them.

• Strategic alignment occurs when all parts of the choir sing their respective parts in harmony to achieve a higher purpose, the music as a symphony of voice.  Strategic Alignment" occurs on multiple levels, but it presupposes the ability of each 'link' to articulate their 'strategic intent'. If strategic intent can be understood (both within and without the organization), the alignment process becomes an analytical 'e-harmony' process where the actual configuration of the organization's strategy is a consequence of design and implementation strategies.

Posted in: Change Management,Execution,Strategy