Strategy

“Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare.”
– Japanese Proverb

Strategy tells you where you are going and why you are going there. Your organisation’s strategic direction provides you with an end goal; a long term direction that guides decision-making and business activity. Forming strategy can be a challenge. And some of the first steps are the hardest – developing the strategic roadmap, establishing strategic objectives, and deciding on strategic targets requires planning, commitment and time. But with these foundations in place, you are already on the road toward your strategic goals. What’s more is that once you know where you are going, you are able to see if the current and planned projects and programs that make up your portfolio will actually contribute to getting you there.

Benefit Management has extensive experience in the area of strategic planning, covering all of the areas mentioned above. We focus our efforts on making sure that your strategy is clear, and that you are confident you can achieve it. With this in mind, we have assisted several public and private sector organisations to establish agreed strategic targets, and then to link the contribution of projects and programs in the portfolio to ensure that the right projects are in place.

Commonly being clear on targets and being clear on what work is needed to achieve targets means that the wrong projects are stopped before they are even started. As an example, for one of our clients, this assessment of contribution led to an estimated $6 million project being removed before any significant costs had been incurred. Before they had strategic targets, there was no way to properly assess contribution, so projects like this one had approved – with the result that there was no clear impetus to deliver and no clear consequence when project slippage occurred. The management team is now re-focused on where they are going, why and importantly, have the confidence to choose the right projects and programs to get them there.