The SAR tool examines the organization’s initiatives across 4 different areas (quadrants). This tool is developed to help organizations document the set of initiatives needed to bridge the gap between the current state operating model and the desired future state operating model. Check out Part 1 for more details.
In this example, a company is looking to be the “Digital Retail Leader” by transforming its business through several digital programs. Company went through several discovery walkthroughs & interviews, however, it is struggling to document the different programs to get the buy-in from the c-suite.
Company utilized the Strategic Alignment Roadmap to document the set of initiatives needed to bridge the gap between the current state and future state vision.
Problem Overview
This example explores how one company in the retail market is looking to revamp its business operations to be a leader in the new digital retail era.
This company is facing several operational, financial and compliance issues that negatively impact customer retention and company revenue growth. On top of that, the company is facing another challenge, which is the ability to create an alignment between different stakeholders, including multiple c-suites and VPs (e.g. VP of Innovation, Chief Digital Officer, CFO, Chief Data Officer, and VP of Accounting).
This alignment is a great challenge since different departments, different leaders and different visions are discussed, where each department is working in silos.
Solution Implemented
Under the direction of the CEO & entire C-Suite, the leadership established an overall initiative called “Big Goals”.
The program was to look at each of the quadrants of the SAR model to understand the main pain points in each of the quadrant (i.e. Process Improvements, Technology Enablement, People Planning and Risk Management).
Specifically. for each of the quadrant, management undertook a discovery phase; this discovery consisted of several walkthroughs with business leads and industry experts to highlight current pain points and establish the future state vision (i.e. what Digital Retail means to this company). The main objective was to listen to the operational business team to gather & document what they think needs to happen, why it needs to happen and in what order it needs to happen. The owners of the business operations hold great intelligence about the company and the pain points like no consultant or senior leadership can have. It is crucial to identify the right players and truly listen to what they have to say.
The company’s leadership understood as well that they need to take a look at the entire enterprise architecture, which consisted of 5 elements that helps generate an effective and efficient business process. The company went to evaluate the current transformation initiatives as well as future potential ones. The idea is to create a complete solution, which consists of a governance model, implementation structure and a set of run & maintain procedures that serves your business.
Once the different pain points were identified and a program was assigned to each pain point. The different programs went through a qualitative and quantitative assessment to determine measure the impact the business objective (y-axis) as well as to outline a suggested timeline in mind (x-axis). Please note in future series we can check out in details how to measure impact and outline a timeline for each single program.
Outcome and example of the Roadmap documented (SAR tool)
After the discovery phase was concluded (i.e. interviews conducted, intelligence about the current state gathered and documented the future state vision) and a rough outline of the project quadrant were established, management further utilized the SAR tool to document and visualize the projects needed to be performed over the next 18 months.
It is important to note that the SAR tool is a dynamic tool and can (and should) constantly change per progress made across the overall programs. Below is the template and a completed SAR model for this use case.
Template
Example of SAR tool
In future posts, we can explore how to look at each quadrant and assess what programs or projects need to be pursued and how to weight impact and assess timeline.
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Strategy+ Series: At Signify Solution, we believe in providing advisory and assurance services that help our clients better plan and solve their business problems. Strategy+ is our set of frameworks and our solutions we implement at our clients. Strategy+ posts are our way to share our knowledge, allowing us to have a bigger reach and impact at our clients.
Please contact me directly at mostafa@signifysolution.com to connect, chat and see how we can help you out.
I help companies create a total view of the different projects they need to pursue as well as challenge the impact of each of these projects against the business objectives established by the leadership.
The views, information or opinions expressed in this short article are the views of my own. All information in this article is provided “as is”, with no guarantee of completeness, accuracy, timeliness or of the results obtained from the use of this information.
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