Strategy Development and Alignment

Intent
CPD's Strategy Development and Alignment process will enhance the success of any organization's activity by ensuring that significant intentions and behaviors are in agreement with one another and also support the company's values and strategic direction. This particular process has been successfully implemented for more than 20 years in more than 18 countries, and across various industries and organizational structures. It is simple and extremely effective, and inevitably produces instant results for both the organization and its management team.

Philosophy
Corporate managers are bombarded with information and are often expected to make swift decisions that fit within the context of the corporation's strategic direction. This process can be particularly challenging if decisions are made based on an intuitive strategy without consulting the corporation's strategic aims or worse yet on no particular strategy at all. Instead, managers should make major decisions that ensure all members of the management team are aligned with the strategic direction of the company. For example, if the company is utilizing a market-oriented strategy, all major decisions should reflect that market orientation: Human Resources should primarily recruit market-oriented people and train people in market-oriented issues; Performance Management Systems should encourage relevant market-oriented factors; Information Systems should reflect market-oriented measurable factors, etc.

Objectives
In the Strategy Development and Alignment process, you will learn how to:

• Review the organization's strategic objectives and the team members' degree of alignment with those objectives

• Assess the degree of alignment between and among the various team members
  

• Use these degrees of alignment to refocus the consideration of strategic objectives

• Produce a well-formed strategy document, including all relevant aspects of the strategy

• Launch a fully-aligned management team with all members clearly able to carry the strategic plan forward in their day-to-day actions and decisions

Overview
The Strategy Development and Alignment process targets the management team of a corporation, project, or organization, engaging the members in a brief analysis of the organization's current strategy document, and also conducting individual interviews. Subsequently, the management team gathers for a two-day off-site meeting, which includes both seminar-style presentations and focused working groups actively creating the precise parameters of alignment.

The process includes a powerful method of measuring the degrees of alignment between the management team members, which are measured by the consultants, analyzed, and then expressed as correlation factors. The numerical expression of this strategic alignment process stimulates exciting and high-powered discussions of each of the strategic focus areas that are directly relevant to the organization's success. CPD's consultants, in guiding this process, offer a model for the development of a well-formed strategy, including examples and criteria.