“There’s never enough time to do it right, but there’s always enough time to do it over.”
Jack Bergman
Retired United States Marine Corps Lieutenant General and the U.S. Representative for Michigan’s 1st congressional district.
Have you seen the effects of not doing it right the first time and needing to do it over? We have spent our careers improving business outcomes by adopting holistic, technology-enabled solutions to address challenges. However, we have seen an obstacle to swift, harmonious progress – the lack of clear objectives, connection to the work to achieve them, and prioritization for the people who must execute them. These obstacles have resulted in numerous repeats of improvement initiatives and digital transformation programs across industries and companies.
Often leaders ask their people to execute projects, but fail to explicitly connect those projects to the organization’s objectives and goals. They cut corners and assume that all stakeholders are aligned. As consultants and in industry, we have seen this happen too many times and believe that more time should be spent in coordinating and planning the suite of projects.
Investing the time for setting up and aligning the Objectives, Goals, Strategies (Projects) and Measures correctly the first time avoids time consuming and frustrating situations such as these:
- Max starts a project, not knowing that much of what he was planning to do is in the scope of another existing project.
- Mary is now in the 8th month of the year with an improvement target for which she has no plan of how to achieve it.
- Sarah is trying to conduct a project but is having trouble getting others to provide support / give it the priority that she gives it.
- Mark has set financial goals for cost reduction but has no understanding of what projects are being done to achieve that savings.
- Claire is assigned to four different projects and all appear to be of the highest priority, yet she does not have sufficient time to dedicate to all of them.
Key steps were missed. Corners were cut. The Objectives and Goals were not linked with Strategies/Projects and were not prioritized and clearly communicated. Instead, we have a hodgepodge collection of semi-defined initiatives and individuals with unachievable annual improvement targets. Synergy does not exist between the initiatives that have been called out, the available resources (time, capital, etc.), and individual improvement targets. The resulting confusion leads to suboptimal use of the resources, poor execution of projects and the lack of achievement of the individual Goals.
The solution can be an approach using the OGSM framework – linking Objectives, Goals, Strategies (Projects) and Measures as pictured below. Leading companies have cascading, highest-level corporate Objectives and the individual contributor Goals support the Objectives. At the end of the period (typically a year), everyone is measured by the success of their clear objectives that support the company goals.
7 Key Steps for Utilizing the OGSM Framework:
- Lay out the OGSM framework.
- Depending on the amount of strategic direction you have received from your leadership, you can choose either a Top Down, Bottom-Up or Hybrid approach:
- Top-Down Approach: If given Objectives to improve by leadership for the period (for Operations these often include Safety, Service, Operational Excellence, Quality, Cost, and/or Working Capital), then break the Objectives into smaller, attainable Goals. The question to ask is “If I achieve these Goals, will I achieve the Objective”.
- Bottom-Up Approach: You can work from the bottom of the framework up, also. If an individual has a certain improvement target, or known Projects to execute, then you can link those to specific Goals and Objectives.
- Define Strategies (these can also be called Projects) for each goal. If there are Projects that have been called out that do not support Goals, either create the Goal (and the objective) that the Project will support or question the validity of that Project. You will also find that some Strategies/Projects will impact multiple Goals and Objectives – so repeating is acceptable. Now every Objective, Goal and Strategy (Project) is linked in the chain.
- Define the Measures that you will monitor to determine success. Ideally these match with the goals and are quantifiable, but you may also have qualitative Goals. Think of this as the scoreboard to be reviewed at the end of each period to track performance. You may want to think like a sports scoreboard – goals in the FIFA World Cup, strokes in the Masters, time in the Tour de France, etc.
- Now that there is a cohesive framework of (interrelated) Objectives, Goals, Strategies (Projects) and Measures; evaluate the effort needed from key resources to execute the work and the available capacity of those resources. The resources can be people, facilities, capital, etc. If the effort needed is greater than the capacity, work to prioritize projects, alleviate the constraints or reduce the effort needed from the key resources for the overloaded times.
- When the work in the OGSM is balanced with the capacity, communicate it out to the team.
- Schedule a regular cadence of OGSM review meetings to monitor Project and Measures progress and re-prioritize as needed on your journey to achieve your Objectives and Goals!
Now you have a living, prioritized OGSM portfolio that can be executed. Everyone knows what each team member is to work on and how the resources are to be used. This may seem like more upfront work than desired, but as the saying goes “There’s never enough time to do it right, but there’s always enough time to do it over.”
Alignment to goals and objectives and linking that to measurable metrics at the beginning is critical to success. It will prevent the “do it over” as Lieutenant General Jack Bergman has so eloquently stated.
Have you seen these types of challenging situations? Have there been times where you had several concurrent projects ongoing, but didn’t achieve the results? What did you do to course correct? Did you use a framework like this at the beginning, late and/or in a subsequent iteration? What did you see? We would love to hear about your experiences. Share your comments. Contact us at [email protected] and follow us at Sigma Supply Chain Partners – Linked In.
