How does Ardoq support Strategy to Execution and how can IT, business leaders, and enterprise architects benefit from our pre-configured solution? In this document, we answer these questions and show you how you can better define, monitor, communicate, and adjust strategies in response to changing business conditions.
Contents:
What is Strategy to Execution (S2E)?
Strategy execution is the process where a company’s strategy, objectives, change initiatives, business units, and IT are fully aligned.
Objectives and initiatives must be clearly communicated and understood in order to achieve the desired results effectively. The management team, department leaders, and initiative owners must also be able to update each other as they implement their strategies and adjust their plans or budgets.
Finally, they need to track how well they have succeeded in reaching the objectives and what value has been achieved.
What are some of the common problems enterprises face with strategic execution?
A majority of enterprises are not achieving their strategic objectives.
Why is it so difficult to execute a strategy?
One of the key reasons is the lack of alignment between IT and business. Even though IT and business leaders work closely to define plans, the IT landscape is complex and difficult to understand. IT may have hundreds of projects running in parallel, issues may be hidden and not uncovered until late in the implementation stage and problems with one project can have a ripple effect - causing disruption and leading to failure. Without the right tools, it’s impossible to identify opportunities, communicate effectively and manage risks that arise.
In short, the key challenges include;
Rapidly changing IT and business environments
Hundreds of technologies, applications, and resources working to keep up •
Strategy and project plans spread across systems leading to confusion
Lack of high-level overview of how strategies are being implemented, costs, and timelines
Difficulty executing strategies and managing stakeholder expectations
Who is it for?
Ardoq Strategy to Execution is relevant for everyone responsible for identifying, planning, managing, and implementing strategies.
COO and CIO
Head of Portfolio Management
Initiative Owners
Project Managers and Architects
Roles that are accountable for Objectives at the company and team levels.
CEOs and CFOs are also relevant stakeholders because the company as a whole is receiving the value from the Strategy to Execution outcomes.
What questions does Strategy to Execution answer?
Ardoq’s Strategy to Execution is a pre-packaged solution that enables you to quickly answer more than 30 questions within 3 key areas. You can adapt the solution to answer more questions as required.
Key strategies and objectives
Key initiatives (and projects or epics)
Impact and Benefits of Initiatives on the Business
Examples of questions include:
What are the key objectives (OKRs)?
When will they be delivered - by whom?
Are costs in line with strategy?
What are the potential conflicts or misalignments?
Where are there dependencies between projects so I can manage them effectively?
What is the impact of a change in priority?
Who should I inform about a potential change?
How many of our objectives have we reached so far?
What are the results?
For a complete list of questions see: Strategy to Execution: Purpose, Scope, and Rationale
Ardoq Presentations and Ardoq Discover present visual answers to these questions. Various levels of detail are available for filtering and exploring questions.
What are the benefits of using Ardoq?
The benefits of Ardoq include:
Better business and IT alignment: When there is alignment between the IT and business it can lead to better coordination, collaboration, and focus. This, in turn, can improve efficiency, reduce duplication of efforts, and help the organization achieve its goals more quickly.
Efficient use of resources: Ardoq can provide you with a high-level view of costs and investments. This means it’s easier to allocate resources to the right initiatives and projects and ensure that they are being used in the most productive and impactful way.
Greater adaptability: Strategic execution requires adaptability and flexibility. Ardoq enables leaders to review progress and adjust plans as needed, so the organization can stay agile and respond to changing circumstances.
Accountability: Ardoq provides you with a way to clearly define who is responsible for a specific plan or project and spot places where ownership is missing. This, in turn, can increase motivation, ownership, and commitment to achieving desired results.
Improved Communication: Effective communication is critical to successful strategic execution. Ardoq helps leaders understand the strategy and their role in it, and helps to build a sense of shared purpose.
Overall, Ardoq provides benefits to everyone involved in defining objectives, implementing strategies, managing change, and measuring results.
What is included with Ardoq’s pre-defined solution?
Ardoq provides a set of pre-configured Strategy to Execution assets that are available as part of the platform.
Deploy the assets, and add your data, and the various roadmaps, dependency maps, timetables, and dashboards will automatically present you with information about your objectives and key results.
You will also be able to analyze your business architecture and spot where there are areas to align initiatives, save resources, or make improvements.
Ardoq is flexible, so you can adapt the solution as needed to meet your needs.
Strategy to Execution includes:
Step-by-step instructions
Sample data and meta-model
Pre-configured presentations including strategic plans, initiative overviews, dependency maps, roadmaps, and timelines
Pre-defined surveys to collect data about objectives, initiatives, etc.
Broadcasts to remind key people to complete their objectives, define or adjust their initiatives, and update progress
Discover dashboards and reports that provide key stakeholders with answers and insights about strategy execution
Excel Import Templates
Note: Ardoq’s S2E solution builds on Use Cases including Organizational Metamodel Modeling, Business Capability Management (BCM), and Application Lifecycle Management (ALM). To learn more about requirements and configuring your Ardoq implementation to establish connections between these use cases, please refer to the Strategy to Execution Metamodel document. Configuring connections between Use Cases is currently a manual process. Please click the following link for more information. If you have any questions about the configuration process, contact our support team.
How does Ardoq work with other tools?
Ardoq provides insight across interconnected, dynamic information. If your organization has information for strategy execution spread across disparate systems, these can be integrated into Ardoq through integrations or REST-API. Learn more about integrations
What sets Ardoq apart from other software?
There are many types of software that support strategic planning, strategic management, OKRs, and project management. However, these tools typically do not connect all the parts that are needed to support strategic initiatives that require a change to IT systems and data flow.
Ardoq enables you to connect IT initiatives, projects, epics, applications, and infrastructure to any business objectives and initiative - and even business capabilities. With better insight into what is happening across the business, leaders can make better investment and prioritization decisions, and ensure that everyone is aligned toward the same goals.
At a time when businesses are increasingly relying on technology to achieve their short and long-term objectives, this is a clear advantage. Most project and strategic management solutions do not have the same approach.
What Goal-setting frameworks does Ardoq support?
There are many strategy, objective, and goal-setting frameworks used in the industry. Ardoq's S2E provides the OKR approach out of the box. This can be used as a full OKR model, as a lightweight objectives model, or adjusted to your own approach. Ardoq is flexible to meet your requirements.
How does Ardoq support Enterprise Architects during strategy execution?
As a critical role in strategy execution, Enterprise Architects (EAs) provide a framework for aligning objectives and initiatives with business and technology capabilities, as well as execution initiatives designed to achieve those objectives. They have a holistic understanding of the organization's goals, processes, and systems, and can use this knowledge to identify opportunities, reduce costs, and increase agility.
By using Ardoq for strategy execution, EAs can also ensure that technology investments are aligned with the organization's overall strategy. Ardoq enables EAs, to communicate bi-directionally with business leaders to identify areas where technology can be leveraged to create competitive advantages. They can also better prioritize technology investments based on their impact on the organization's goals and objectives.