Implementation Management
As discussed in Decision-making Management, your management teams have a portfolio of techniques to optimize decision-making. But it is just as essential to know how to implement good decisions as to make them, and that is a whole different process. Maplerivertree defines implementation as a process by which managers and organizations translate intentions into actual results, and believes that it is the management’s job to get the job done. While management at different levels of your organization may not always have a say in what choices the business makes, they have to excel at implementing; that’s the heart of good management. On this page, we continue to deploy the process lens for management (you can read more about it here) and provide a framework to aid the implementations in your business.
What Makes an Implementation Good?
Often, companies allow themselves to get distracted by big strategic goals and disruptive innovation - an obsession of big ideas. The hard truth is that the success of every organization rests on its capacity to implement its decisions and execute its key processes efficiently, effectively, and consistently.
Here’s Kevin Sharer, the former Chairman of Amgen, on the importance of implementation in management: “My experience is that coming up with the idea — flawed as our decision process might be — is relatively easy. There are lots of good ideas. It isn't like there's one good idea and all the rest of them are bad. Let's take strategy. It is important to have the right strategy, but it's incredibly difficult to implement the strategy. You have to show that you can implement things. That is your job. If you can't implement, the company can't implement. So focusing on getting things done is job one, two, and three. Now, you need to get them done in the right way. You need to have a way to communicate with your boss so that if you run into trouble, there are no surprises. But implementation is, in effect, the be-all and end-all at the management level.”
Ineffective implementation is pretty easy to recognize. Simply examine a project that’s significantly over-budget, a new product that’s delayed, a team in the midst of a mean-spirited fight, or a service that’s low-quality and unreliable. In most cases, poor management of implementation is the cause. Effective implementation can be harder to spot because there are no problems. Here’s Maplerivertree’s take on effective implementation: Effective implementation is delivering what's planned or promised on time, on budget, at quality, and with the minimum of variability. Even in the face of unexpected events and contingencies. This definition captures four essential truths about implementation:
First, delivering what's planned or promised. When it comes to determining whether or not implementation has been effective success must be measured against pre-established goals and targets. You can't say, for example, that achieving a 5% increase in market share is excellent in and of itself, especially if you're shooting for attainment twice as large. You have got to compare actual performance to concrete, already agreed-upon deliverables. Second, delivering on time, on budget, and at quality. Successfully delivering what is promised isn't enough. The when and how of delivery are equally important. For example, a successful new product rollout that's a year late and way over the budget does not constitute successful implementation. Third, delivering with a minimum of variability. Rarely does the success of a new program, product, or project hinge on a single action or event. Instead, implementation unfolds over time, putting a premium on coordination, repetition, and consistency. Managers and employees must take the same actions and repeat the same actions, time and time again, with limited variability, even in the face of unexpected events. As Leonard Sayles, the management scholar, puts it, "management is a contingency activity. It is most needed in the face of changing conditions or circumstances." For this reason, management shouldn't be given a free pass when actions or events don't go as planned. Both foresight to spot issues early and resilience to deal with issues that do come up are crucial to good implementation. To this end monitoring and corrective action are key. We like these criteria because they eliminate many common excuses we have heard for unsatisfactory performance. Such gems include:
“The plan was too ambitious.”
“It was the right idea for the wrong time.”
“The economy took a bad turn.”
“The marketing department really blew it.”
“There’s no way we could have predicted that the supplier would fold.”
In short: “It wasn’t my fault!” Look at the definition of variability. This is one that most managers don’t immediately grasp. How does variability undermine implementation and are there particular circumstances in which minimizing variability is especially important? Variability or the allowance of deviation undermine the legitimacy of the decision and people will lose the commitment or worse the respect to follow through.
Don’t get the wrong idea. Our definition of effective implementation does not include or imply managerial omniscience or clairvoyance. What it does require is a blend of anticipation and resilience—the ability to sniff out potential problems while they are still correctable and the ability to bounce back should problems occur anyway. These skills, in turn, require a firm understanding of implementation as a process that needs to be managed well. Here’s Prof. Len Schlesinger from Harvard Business School on the importance of taking a process perspective on implementation:
“The benefits of using the process perspective, obviously, are incalculable in my mind. The vast majority of failures that we find in organizational implementation, I would ascribe to a systematic lack of attention to process dimensions. That in fact, we have lots of people who focus at the strategic level and at the philosophical level, and simply assume that implementation will take care of itself. Nothing could be further from the truth. Without a deep process orientation, you're likely to have a continuing stream of failures in implementation. As with the decision-making process, mastering the implementation process requires disabusing yourself of a passel of myths.”
Myths About Getting the Job Done
Implementation works best with broad, open-ended goals, and deliverables: Ineffective or junior management teams tend to think of implementation as “tactical”—something that they can delegate while focusing on “more important” issues, like crafting high-level strategies. Best to set loose goals and let your employees figure out the details, right? Other managers are too wary of micro-managing and feel they should empower employees by leaving them alone. Either way, managers from time to time fail to communicate to others what tasks need to get done and why they are essential to company strategy. This leaves employees either (a) missing the big picture and going off in the wrong direction or (b) missing essential details necessary for the plan to succeed. In fact, these problems are two sides of the same coin. In the first case, managers fail to provide their team with information on context (industry and competitive backdrop, department politics, functional loyalties, key stakeholders, nonfinancial concerns, etc.). The idea is that too much strategic or contextual information will distract employees from their primary focus—execution. In the second case, when employees lack understanding of granular details, confusion and delay will arise because people will not understand what they are actually supposed to do. The objectives of the process are not communicated or vaguely defined. As Henry Mintzberg has argued, strategies must be “programmed" so that lofty goals and objectives (e.g., “improve customer satisfaction”) are translated into concrete activities and deliverables (e.g., “raise net promoter scores 20% on product XYZ by increasing the speed of email responses to customer complaints”). In short, implementation works best with crisp goals and deliverables which can be measured. Progress and milestones need to be measured so that teams can adjust what they are doing, as will almost always be necessary to get the job done.
Once responsibility for a deliverable has been assigned, the manager’s job is largely done: An effective manager transfers responsibility for an activity—often described as delegation—while retaining accountability for the ultimate outcome. They must therefore take steps to make sure the subordinates are successful. These steps include deciding what to delegate and to whom, establishing a timeline, providing essential support, checking in, providing oversight and feedback, and more. The manager’s job is not done until the job is done.
Managers should only intervene in the implementation if something goes wrong: Plans are bound to go off track, if only because of changes to the context. Managers should certainly intervene under such circumstances. Returning to earlier steps of the implementation process or even revising plans altogether is to be expected. More importantly, managers should never be afraid to get involved before things go south. As implementation proceeds, managers should be monitoring progress, keeping an eye out for warning signals, providing helpful feedback, removing roadblocks, and otherwise proactively helping the process to proceed smoothly. Good managers identify a number of leading indicators of progress. When they detect that the process is not proceeding as expected, they treat that as a red flag that things may be off track. With regular monitoring and pre-established check-ins, a manager may be in the dark for a few days, but not—as is often the case—for weeks or months.
Projects conclude with a defined end and an acknowledgment by all involved that they are completed: Sadly, this all too rarely happens. As projects wrap up, many managers and their teams understandably run out of gas. People want the project to be done so they can move on. They often fail to agree on a shared assessment of whether they actually got the job done—as defined when it was begun. Few managers hold post-game reviews to compare what has been delivered to what was promised at the start. The next steps are rarely discussed.
While we’ve identified some principles as to what contributes to effective implementation, we have not clearly defined a process for implementation. What concrete steps are involved in what order? Maplerivertree will now introduce a model of implementation that addresses these questions. Its main goals are to describe (a) how to get work done today and (b) how to create the conditions to do better work tomorrow.
Implementation: An Art, Practice, and Process
If you were the founder of a business and were to ask the management, “How did we get the last initiative done?” you’d be likely to get a range of responses. “What do you mean ‘get it done?’” she might say. So many conversations, emails, meetings, and presentations went into her last project that she can’t give you a succinct answer. Managers usually feel that they have improved over time, but lack a comprehensive, orderly framework with which to improve the odds of success. Such a model would certainly be helpful. What should go in it? Here’s Kevin Sharer’s answer:
A couple of things it has to have is a series of questions. Do we have goals that six months out, a year out, two years out indicate that implementation is happening? That is, do we know what good looks like? Do we have success benchmarks? The process of agreeing on what those benchmarks are is vital to implementation. Two, do we have sufficient resources in terms of money, people, technology, and time to actually achieve the task at hand? Three, do we have slack built into the system so, when we have the implementation issues that we inevitably have, do we have time and ability to recover? And then, finally, do we have feedback loops at the top that we can hear early enough about issues of implementation so we can either put more resources against it, change the objective, or change the people? Do we have a monitoring system? So implementation is the work of the manager. It is the single hardest thing to do in business.
All effective implementation processes share common attributes which Maplerivertree captures in a seven-step process for implementation: one, set goals and define deliverables; two, determine roles, responsibilities, and relationships; three, delegate the work; four, execute the plan, monitor progress and performance, and provide continued support; five, take corrective action (either minor adjustments or major revisions); six, get closure on the project and agreement on the output; and seven, conduct a retrospective or review of how the process went.
Two caveats before we dive into each of these stages. First, note that this process assumes that managers or relevant leaders have already made a number of strategic decisions: what markets the company will play in, how it plans to gain a competitive advantage in those markets, what projects to pursue to carry out its strategy, and so on. The implementation process outlined above thus describes how a manager should go about executing an already established plan, but does not involve assessing whether that plan is worth pursuing. Second, these stages do not always unfold as neatly or rigidly as our list suggests. You’ll almost always have to jump around or circle back in response to new information. In fact, if you make it through the process without revisiting earlier stages, you probably didn’t implement it effectively. Why not? Because implementation is an iterative process, not a linear one. The deliverable defined in stage one might need to be redefined in stage five. A responsibility assigned in stage two may need to expand to meet unforeseen demands discovered in stage four. In sum, think of the implementation process above not as a formula but as a set of guidelines a checklist of managerial processes—like goal-setting, delegating, monitoring, and reviewing—each of which your management must learn to shape.
The Seven Stages of Implementation
Stage one — Set Goals and Define Deliverables: In any project, the manager must first articulate one or more goals. Goals should be SMART. That means Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Results-oriented, Time-bound. These goals should be set in consultation with all relevant stakeholders—leaders, employees, other departments, and so on—to increase the likelihood of success. Alright, now one of your management team has finalized a SMART goal(s) to build a product with features A, B, and C with help from team D, by date E, for under F dollars, for market segment G. But that alone doesn’t make the goals actionable. (How would a team even start building such a product?). After all, declaring that you will complete a triathlon in 3 months is ambitious and specific, but it doesn’t guarantee that you’ll deliver on dieting or hitting the gym on schedule. So now the manager has to define deliverables—actionable and “fail-able” tasks that must be completed in order for a team to hit its targets. Here, the management needs to focus on behaviors. What needs to happen, by when, and how will it be measured—in effect, how will this test be graded? To complete a triathlon in 3 months, for example, you might commit to running 5k every evening at 8 pm and completing a diet check-list 18 times a week. Even so, remember that the plan is only a rough draft. There will be many more iterations to come.
Stage two — Determine Roles, Responsibilities, and Relationships: Now that the teams are on the same page—for the moment —about what needs to be done, we need to know who will do it. That is, what roles are needed and what responsibilities will each one have. You also have to clarify relationships: exactly how these different players—people, teams, departments, vendors—will interact. Who will report to whom? Who will need to collaborate to get the job done? But this is more than “sketching out the org chart.” You need to spell out how people will interact in practice: decision rights, accountabilities, rules of communication, and so on. For example, who gets to make the call on a certain piece of the project? Who is ultimately accountable for the success (or failure) of a deliverable? Who will provide updates, write up status reports, and conduct check-ins to make sure everyone is on the same page?
Teams might use a RACI matrix or a similar tool to make these distinctions clear. A RACI matrix, for example, specifies who is responsible for what deliverable, who is accountable for the quality and timeliness of that deliverable, who needs to be consulted on key decisions concerning the deliverable, and who needs to be informed as the deliverable becomes due and the project continues. Being upfront about roles, responsibilities, and relationships early on is absolutely crucial because it prevents confusion and turf wars down the line.
Stage three: Delegate the Work: Delegation brings the first two stages together and into practice by formally assigning the deliverables defined in stage one to the people in the roles defined in stage two. But your management teams should be mindful to not simply hand out work and send people on their way. To delegate effectively, they have to give team members enough resources, background, context, authority, latitude, support, and guidance. So delegation is itself a multi-step process that unfolds throughout the implementation.
Stage four: Execute the Plan, Monitor Progress and Performance, and Provide Continued Support: As an experienced executive once told us, only partly in jest, “This is where the magic happens.” No matter how well planned, a project will hit road bumps during execution. So a manager must consistently monitor progress and performance. As people are doing, the manager needs to be viewing and comparing what’s been done to agreed-upon milestones and quality standards. This isn’t micro-managing; that’s telling people how to do what they already know how to do or can figure out for themselves. This is passing on crucial information—from your manager’s viewpoint at a somewhat higher altitude—on whether people need to change course (which they can do in stage five). Monitoring is a lot more work than it sounds, but you can make it easier by making the process more systematic; for example, by planning daily, weekly, or monthly check-ins, establishing due dates and milestones and sending out status reports. Such methods can serve as early warning systems that bring problems to the surface before they become serious. Monitoring, however, should not be a one-way street. Use the information you gather to offer resources, remove roadblocks, give feedback, and generally provide continued support. Monitoring will always be something of a burden to employees, but if that isn’t outweighed by the help it provides, then you’re doing something wrong. So you can think of this stage as a cycle of “doing, viewing, and helping.”
Stage five: Take Corrective Action (Adjust or Revise): No matter how well you manage the first four steps, mid-course corrections will be necessary. In some cases, managers have to make minor tweaks and adjustments as new information becomes available. Maybe another coder is needed or maybe market research needs more time to pursue what’s turning up in the focus groups. In other cases, perhaps because of unexpected competitive moves, technological breakthroughs, or the loss of a key performer, managers will have to significantly revise their plans and essentially start over—completely redefining the deliverables, the roles and responsibilities, and so on. It may even mean going back to the drawing board and formulating a new strategy altogether. The key decision at this stage is: “Do we need to adjust?” or “Do we need to start over?” It’s not always obvious. As we said, implementation is invariably an iterative process. And for more experimental projects, like making a new product or trying out a new business model, starting over or even failing regularly should be the norm.
Stage six: Get Closure on the Project and Agreement on the Output: At the end of a project, everyone on the team should be in agreement on what “done” looks like. But, in fact, they often have widely varying perceptions of what was produced and how well. So managers must meet with the team to acknowledge the varying opinions and try to get everyone aligned on what they have completed and how it compares to what was originally envisioned. They should also communicate the results of the project widely and give credit to individuals as well as to the team. Having a launch party does not substitute for any of this.
Stage seven: Conduct the Retrospective Review: While stage six concerns the final outcomes, the seventh stage of implementation involves conducting a review of the implementation process itself. Reviews can be formal or informal but need to get at a few basic questions. What did we set out to do? How did it go? What went well? What went poorly? How can we do better next time? A manager should seek feedback from individual team members on how he or she managed the process and should provide feedback and coaching for next time. An organization that hopes to learn must also articulate a set of lessons learned after each project. This is extra work, but not as much extra work as repeating your mistakes. ■