Strategy Execution is a Time Allocation Strategy

Like many of you, I am always amazed at how fast the concept we call “time” seems to pass by each year. As the New Year of the Horse begins to unfold and new budgets and annual plans settle in, I am reminded of how much a manager’s success often depends on his or her ability to predict when things will get done. After all, when resources are invested, is the question “when will we see the benefits?” not the thing that ultimately matters to an organisation?

In my book, “Executing Your Strategy”, an effort was made to describe the significant challenges that leaders face when trying to determine the resource capacity of the business to execute their strategy in a given year. Based on my experience, organisations – whether they have 30, 300 or 3,000 people – rarely have processes that can determine their true capacity for executing a portfolio of projects defined in their strategic plans. And when top managers cannot reconcile the resources required to accomplish the new work, as well as the current workload, they have relatively poor estimations of the benefit-realisation schedule usually described in the financial section of the strategic plan.

The real issues in executing strategy and estimating “time-to-benefit” tend to center on defining the real capacity of the individuals who must implement the work and get results. In “Executing Your Strategy”, we explained that spreadsheets and databases have been developed that can calculate the workload of people across an organisation and compute to several decimal places the loading of any person, group or business unit. However, such information systems are only as good as the underlying assumptions on which they are built and the frequent updating of information that must be done to track actual progress.

Here are the realities that must be taken into consideration when looking at what an individual (especially a manager) can achieve, if he or she is asked to work on a project or strategic initiative in an eight-hour working day.

–How many other duties does the individual have that cut into their apparent capacity? If you are a manager running both a project and a business process, you have administrative project-leadership demands and process-support demands that easily consume your bandwidth. What about your continuous-learning needs, to make you better at your job?

–How much unproductive work takes place around you? How many personal matters do you take care of during the day? Have you ever made an unimportant phone call or engaged in general banter and sports gossip at the water cooler? How many organisational reports do you have to complete and how many department meetings do you have to attend that do not relate directly to your work?

These all add up quickly, to the point where research shows that project workers have about five hours per day of productive time to convert strategy into action.  However, the issue of effective use of available time does not end here. The remaining five hours can vary dramatically.

Consider the following:

1. What level of noise and interruptions are happening around you?

2. What is your actual skill level to carry out the work required?

3. How many different contexts do you have to think about on a continuous basis?

4. How much overtime are you working to meet the schedule?

Let’s look at each of these. First, noise and interruptions affect productivity in a very distinct way. When a complex task that requires concentration is interrupted, it may take as long as 15 minutes for a person to return to a level of concentration where clarity of thinking can solve complicated problems. Leslie Perlow, in her fascinating book “Finding Time”, details the real case of a technology company that suffered from a noisy environment. She quantified the actual difference in knowledge workers’ productivity at as much as 50 per cent. Now we are down to about 2.5 hours out of the original five we started with.

An individual’s skill level can also degrade his or her performance time by as much as twice. Tom DeMarco, who wrote the book “Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency”, discovered that the average person was 2.5 times slower than the fastest. Now you can really begin to see the compounding factors about estimating time. And it gets worse!

Let’s add the effect of context switching. A 1992 study of 1,000 IBM engineers sought to uncover the effect of multiple projects on individual productivity. It found that the productivity level was around 70 per cent when working on two projects simultaneously. When a third project was added the productivity dropped dramatically to 50 per cent. So when people have large numbers of projects, many interruptions and less than average skills, the original five hours of productivity can drop to less than one.

Most organisations that do not plan on how to effectively execute their strategies end up requiring their employees to work overtime to meet unrealistic published schedules. So now you have to add the factor of what happens to the quality of work when people become tired. It should be no surprise to learn that executing strategy is hard.

Bringing it all up to date, most of us now carry our “Crackberries” around, with instant messages and e-mail access. So it is not hard to see the difficulty in determining the true capacity of a department or business unit. Strategic resource planners must really temper their planning models with a heavy dose of reality, and this affects real capacity. Leaders beware: the real time you have in your department is not what you think it is! In the 365 days of 2014, good luck in implementing your strategic plans and getting results!  Remember, strategy execution is a time allocation process!

By William Malek