kippy
strategy execution roadmap
This roadmap details a step-by-step path to easily introduce strategy and performance management to your organisation.
Initiation
You may already have a strategy management function, trying to instil it for the first time .... or somewhere in between. The following section can help you get started and/or validate the foundations.
Step 1. Assess the strategy maturity with the kippy assessment questionnaire
It is very important to start with understanding the strategy maturity of your organisation. You can use this questionnaire to ask and answer key questions and highlight gaps and opportunities. You can also periodically re-run this assessment, to ensure your organisation is getting better at managing its strategy.
Step 2. Create a clear business case for performance management benefits
By managing your strategy more effectively, organisations can see improvements of many percentage points to their bottom line. However, the initial investment of cost and effort is often prohibitive to implement a well-functioning performance management function. Kippy significantly reduces that initial investment - so by clearly articulating and presenting the benefits, it should be an easy decision for people to buy in to strategy execution improvement. Check out our features and videos for a better understanding of the benefits and how kippy can help achieve them.
Step 3. Identify a senior internal sponsor for your initiative
Changing the fundamental culture of an organisation is never easy - so make sure you have the support of someone in the organisation with the vision, gravitas and progressive mindset to push the organisation forward. Use them as a sounding board to refine your business case to make sure it's accurate but also achievable - and explains the nominal upfront investment needed. Check out our blog for a range of use cases, best practices and gotchas to up-skill and talk authoritatively on what's currently happening in the industry.
Step 4. Get buy-in from founder, CEO and/or executives
The organisation's strategy needs to flow down from the very top - so that buy-in will ensure you start on the right foot. Present your business case and validate that this is something the leadership wants to do and they want to do now.
Step 5. Decide upon your methodology (BSC, OKR, OGSM, MBO)
Whether you have already decided upon your methodology or not, this article can help you understand the differences, which one is most appropriate for you and explains how kippy can be used for all of them.
Discovery
The following section guides you through the process of capturing the information you'll need from your organisation.
Please note, this roadmap simplifies the steps needed to set up your strategy management function. However, the effort needed to collate all the information, if not readily available, can be substantial. The Kippy Enterprise Accelerator package can help you get set up faster, by using our partner consultants to do that leg work for you.
Step 6. Download and use the kippy data-gathering template
The kippy data-gathering template can eventually be used to easily upload your existing KPI and Project information into your kippy instance. However, it is also a really useful way to capture the various pieces of information from your initial discovery. Fill in the Objectives and KPIs tab with your organisation's top-level objectives and KPIs.
If you need help understanding the difference between objectives vs KPIs vs goals vs milestones - get certified with a remote training session or online Udemy course. For more info, see this blog article.
Step 7. Capture the Vision, Mission and Values from your execs
These should be the corner stone of all the activity your organisation is involved in - but are often not very well publicised or referenced. By bring these to the fore, it will help you and everyone else, pull in the same direction, in the same way, for the same reasons.
Step 8. Identify 4-5 well formed Level 1 objectives
Objectives are action statements that clarify how your organisation will implement the strategy. This blog article explains the importance of choosing clear objectives and what a well-formed set of objectives look like. As always, contact us if you need help refining your objectives.
Step 9. Define 1-2 KPIs per objective, with an assigned KPI owner
It is quite likely your organisation has a set of KPIs that are used to measure your corporate performance. But it is also quite likely that they are not well documented or managed consistently, with clear traceability to the corporate strategy.
Kippy facilitates an incremental approach to identifying and tracking KPIs, allowing anyone in your organisation to suggest draft KPIs to be tracked. This ensures the people down in the detail of each team can contribute with their expert knowledge, whilst giving you the governance to review and make those KPIs 'live'.
It really is critical to your strategy to have a well-balanced set of KPIs but please note, the 'K' in KPI stands for 'Key'. So to start, capture one or two KPIs per objective - and identify an individual owner, who will help define, track and refine that KPI.
Step 10. Agree targets for upcoming year with each KPI owner
Targets are a great way to stretch and push the organisation forward in meeting its strategic objectives. Kippy allows different KPIs to be tracked at different frequencies e.g. monthly, quarterly, semi-annually or yearly. The blog article here explains how to set targets with each KPI owner.
Set-up
The following section guides you through the process of setting up your kippy cloud instance with the information you captured during discovery.
Step 11. Register your very own kippy cloud instance
To get your very own kippy cloud instance within seconds, simply go to www.kippy.cloud, click Sign Up and enter your email address. That's it - you now have your very own kippy instance.
Please subscribe to the Kippy Premium Plan within your 14 day free trial for additional set-up support.
Step 12. Invite a kippy administrator - and other users with appropriate roles
Signing up automatically makes you the kippy system owner and allows you full access to all of kippy's billing and administrative features. And inviting an 'administrator' can help delegate some of the setup effort to someone else in your team, including giving other members of your organisation access to this kippy cloud instance. The How-To Guide provides more information on what each role is allowed to do.
Step 13. Import the kippy data-gathering template (or let us do it for you)
The kippy data-gathering template you populated during discovery can be imported with one click from the kippy Settings menu. Alternatively, contact support and let us import it for you.
Step 14. Set default language for your kippy instance, choosing from over 100 different languages
When you first register, all the kippy labels and messages are in English. However, by clicking the Language icon, you can choose to have all those labels and messages displayed to you in a different language. And by going to Settings, you can set the default language for all new users of your organisation (which they can override if they want).
Step 15. Tailor default workflow, competencies and branding
To help you get started quicker, kippy comes with some standard default settings e.g. for the task management workflow, whether you want to use kippy for employee appraisals and which competencies you want employees appraised against. However, you can change these now, or later. You can also easily configure your kippy instance with your corporate branding. You can find lots more info in the Quick-start guide
Go-live
The following section guides you through how to roll out kippy to your organisation.
Kippy has been designed to be very intuitive to learn and use - but you can also encourage your invited users to attend a kippy training session to learn the features, methodology and best practices.
Step 16. Go-live, with monthly reminders to KPI owners to submit actuals with evidence
With the top-level information inputted and initial users invited, kippy will now automatically remind KPI owners to submit their progress in a timely manner.
Also, now is a good time to set up your Level 2 teams and ask those managers to populate the cascaded objectives with their local KPIs.
Kippy will automatically update the score for all the KPIs, Projects, Objectives and Teams instantly.
Step 17. KPI owners provide in-context best practices to their teams
The KPI owners can now provide team members with detailed documents, links and videos of how to meet the KPI targets - and ask the team members to do the same - creating a community of experts, focused on each KPI.
Step 18. Project managers track project milestones against shared objectives
Using the Project module, project managers can track strategy centric project milestones in kippy, against the same common corporate objectives as the teams KPIs. This blog article explains how to update the information in kippy directly from your systems.
Contact us and ask about the Kippy Enterprise Plan for more options and examples on how to achieve deep system-to-system integrations.
Step 19. Everyone collaborates on tasks with workflow and alerts
All users can now communicate with each other directly in kippy, directly in context of a KPI (or Project) and its score.
Users can also assign tasks for other users to action, and set reminders, due dates and priority - with tasks going through a workflow, so everyone has clear visibility of the progress that is being made - directly against each KPI (or Project).
Step 20. Manager one-to-one’s with each KPI owner and employee
Managers can now use the automatically summarised scores to drill-down through the most pertinent objectives and help each KPI owner (and Project milestone owner) with constructive and objective feedback.
Review
The following section guides you through how to make the most of all this well structured information and ensure your strategy execution capability doesn't go stale.
Step 21. Managers conduct appraisals against standard competencies
Kippy allows managers to easily appraise their staff against the core company-wide competencies. Managers can easily check how each employee is doing at any time - and converse with them, directly in the context of their contributions and scores.
In turn, this should encourage staff to focus their energies on activities with clear traceability back to the strategic objectives.
This blog article explains more about Employer Appraisals.
Step 22. Regular showcase of contributions and benefits to all teams
The most effective way to ensure your organisation continuously improve its strategy execution capability, is to ensure all staff stay focused on the common objectives. And the best way to keep the staff engaged is to regularly showcase how their contributions have directly impacted the top-level strategy.
Kippy facilitates this with always live presentations and dashboards - helping you present trends, promote good behaviour and increase recognition.
Step 23. Conduct regular and ad hoc strategy reviews with leadership
The kippy user interface scales up and down and works equally as well on an iPhone as it does on a large auditorium screen. Also, the information presented is always live, allowing you to present macro and micro views of performance to leadership at short notice with very little effort.
The information is structured horizontally and vertically across your organisation, by many different dimensions (e.g. teams, levels, cascading objectives, etc.) and segments ( e.g. KPIs, project milestones, people, etc.) - and the interactive dashboards let you drill-down in to 'red' problem areas for more detailed discussions during these reviews.
Did you know, you can drive your kippy presentations with your voice? Check out this blog article to see how.
Step 24. Conduct end of year retrospective of strategy management
It is very important to regularly review and refine your strategy management capability itself, by discussing what is and is not working for your organisation, and feedback on what can be improved. This blog article highlights some of the common pitfalls to look out for.
Step 25. Refine strategy and set targets for following year
By the end of the year, all your leaders, managers and colleagues will be regularly contributing updates to your kippy instance by :
- suggesting draft KPIs and projects
- cascading common objectives alongside local objectives.
- providing regular actuals and notes
But as well reviewing the progress against the current strategy, the end of the year is the right time to use all this information at your disposal to decide how you want to adapt your strategy for the coming year. This blog article can help you with that.