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Executive Summary

CEOs are typically interested in Viva fortwo very different reasons - first is working IN the business - these are the day-to-day business of sales, productivity, finances etc. Microsoft has published plenty of material on this topic.

The second path is working ON the business- these are things that the CEO and executive committee do to develop the strategy and build better business processes. This blog posts focuses on this path.

The major tasks done by the CEO's while working on the business include:

• developing and communicating strategy
• ensuring effective strategy execution
• building more effective business processes
• engaging and developing employees

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(This model is explained in this video.)

Viva’s support to the CEO’s working ON the business.

Surfacing and Validating Strategy

Need

Setting an appropriate strategy is perhaps the most critical task of any CEO. Typically, the CEO works in conjunction with the Executive Committee to develop a rough-cut strategy which is then refined within each department and rolled back up. The elapsed time for this is typically 16 weeks - this means most plans are out of date even before they're launched, huge amounts of leadership time is consumed, and the resulting plans tend to be focused on each silo as opposed to the entire organization.

What Viva can do to help…

Copilot becomes an invaluable tool - think of a typical Executive Committee, let's say 10 people each with 30 years’ experience - a total of 300 years’ experience (assuming they can each remember everything they have learned over their careers). Copilot brings 300,000 years of experience (or more). More importantly it provides depth and information not only from the organization’s current products and markets, competitive offerings, other industries in the same market, the same industry in other markets, etc.

A wealth of wisdom not previously available.

Because Copilot respects data security, the organization can validate its strategy without the risk of disclosing it’s strategy or historic performance to the Internet - which would happen with public tools like ChatGPT.

The specific things Viva and Copilot can do include:

• Surface strategy from existing documents, videos (all hands meetings), etc.
• Validate it against persona’s (“Look at this strategy through the eyes of our…Investors, Legal Team, Regulators, Customers, Competitors…)
• Scenario test the rough cut strategy both by using outside-in and inside-out techniques.
• Apply standard strategy tools such as SWOT, Roger Martin’s Play to Win, Michael Porter's five forces etc.
• Clearly capture the strategic objective sand key results (OKRs) to ensure alignment and commitment to the required performance.

Benefits

Our clients have experienced a reduction in the elapsed time from 16 weeks to three weeks, an increase in strategy quality as measured by their ability to achieve performance targets, and a far greater strategic agility by being able to refine their strategy at least quarterly, or as required.

Research indicates that organizations that manage using OKRs see a 20% performance improvement.

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Link to planning

Need

It seems crazy that in this day-and age-most organizations run with at least three separate, disconnected, planning processes - the strategic planning process that's typically annual and sets the overall organization direction, financial planning, typically executed by Financial Planning and Analysis dept. (FP&A), and operations plans developed by each department.

These plans are often independent and point the organization in different directions.

What Viva can do to help…

(An explanation of this model can be found here)

Copilot Can be used to ensure a direct connection between the corporate strategy as captured in Viva Goals and the financial and operating models as captured in Dynamics 365. Copilot can ensure use of common metrics and targets across the three planning systems and ensure that the correct projects are in place to improve performance and the organization to ensure successful execution.

Viva Goals provides leadership with near-real-time updates on strategy execution and overall performance against these plans.

Benefits

One plan. One view of the truth. The ability to make a shift in one area and see the ripple effect across the organization. It's translating strategy into action.

Organizations see better plans, better execution, higher ownership, and higher overall performance.

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Communicate

Need

One of the most common disconnects we see occurs in the communication cycle. As the strategy story is retold to different stakeholders – investors, the Board of Directors, employees (in all hands meetings), customers (in Marketing and Sales activities), and even in cascading/aligning the organization to the overall strategy - the strategy story changes.

It becomes the broken telephone, where each time the strategy story gets told, the story changes a little bit and by the end does not resemble the original version. In our experience by several months after the initial strategy launch there are dozens of versions and hundreds and hundreds of metrics.

In the end this leads to a diluted strategy, wasted efforts and internal conflict.

What Viva can do to help…

Viva has four modules that directly and indirectly support clear communication.

Topics and Learning ensure that there is a consistent definition and understanding of core strategy elements, terminology, and foundational learning.

Engage builds the history, collective wisdom, and communication around the strategy. Amplify repurposes that content for each media to ensure consistent communication and context appropriate information.

Benefits

Different stakeholders are aligned in their understanding and expectations about the organization. Significant time is saved in creating new communication materials and adjusting those materials as events require.

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Disseminate the strategy across multiple areas.

Need

Once the corporate strategy is set, it needs to be disseminated – with selected information and details, translated, rephrased, and associated to a diverse mix of both internal and external stakeholders. Examples stakeholders with diverse needs include departments, regions, product groups, employees, investors, regulators, and customers.

Each stakeholder needs to understand what part of the strategy they contribute to, where they are impacted, what is expected of them and other elements to support their planning activities.

For example, each department needs to know what parts of the corporate strategy they contribute to, what are the desired performance levels and timing so that they can begin doing their business unit planning for finances, operations, human capital etc.

What Viva can do…

The important activity here is to separate out the elements of the corporate strategy to which each of these stakeholders contributes. For example, Sales needs to be able to take the corporate revenue numbers and break it out in the right level of detail for Sale’s planning needs. This may include Sale’s organization structure for regional or product responsibilities, where marketing tasks end and sales begins, where are field sales responsibilities end and insight customer support begins, etc.

Syntex  is the Microsoft tool to capture these relationships. Syntex becomes the secret sauce that truly enables AI wisdom to be applied within your organization. It makes sure that the various Viva modules are pulling the right data from the right source - creating that “one view of the truth”.

We typically use Goals to capture this “first cut” of responsibilities by area.

Benefits

The ripple effect as one area changes its plans is quickly put into context and understood across the organization. This allows for greater utility, better integration, and significant reduction in wasted resources and time.

This also allows us to capture changes in relationships that often occur but are not seen or understood by the rest of the organization causing performance gaps.

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Assessing current capabilities

Need

Once the “first cut” of responsibilities is created, the organization needs to assess whether that area has the capability- resources, capacity, skills - to achieve their targets within the strategic plan.

This assessment is complex - it needs to look at the area's current capabilities, but also their historic performance trends, executives and key player performance reviews and career plans, ongoing initiatives and projects (which consume scarce resources), etc.

What Viva can do…

Through Goals and the linkage to 365Dynamics, leadership can get a clear view of the organization's capabilities and potential for success. As the departments respond to these strategic imperatives, gap closing projects can be developed and analyzed for success.

Benefits

Plans often succumb to “groupthink” where adequate thought is not given to the organization's capabilities or individual leaders overestimate their organizations capabilities. AI-powered assessments allow an extra opinion at the leadership table to add depth to execution decisions.

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Finalizing OKRs (Objectives and Key Results)

Need

Research indicates that over 80% of strategies fail - not because they are incorrect but because they are not executed. The broken part of almost every strategic plan is the actual execution of that plan.

It is critical that clear sub-objectives and performance targets are set with agreed-to timelines, responsibilities, and linkages across the organization.

What Viva can do…

Viva Goals is specifically designed to capture the organization's core Objectives and their associated Key Results, the network of cross-functional collaborators and timing. This ensures that every department, team and individual understand their linkage to the organization's purpose and their contribution to strategic success.

Topics and Learning provide foundational learning and references so that everyone can understand the new terminology, concepts and approaches contained in the strategy to allow for faster deployment and strategic agility.

Benefits

The formal agreement to these aligned subobjectives and key results builds ownership, enables performance, and ensures resources are intelligently deployed.

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Monitoring the know – and unknown.

Need

Effective performance monitoring needs near-real-time reporting across the organization. Leadership needs to see how the organization is performing against each strategic objective using key performance indicators(KPIs, also known as Key Results) that show timely and relevant information, from the flow of business, at the pace of business.

Often this information is siloed in multiple disconnected systems (accounting, sales, operational), using different units of measures, reported in different formats, provided at different times in the month, reported at different levels of detail, and not linked to other area’s key results. We have also seen in some organizations where the reported data changes month on month based on what good news is available.

This information needs to be harmonized and linked to the strategy and other areas so that leadership can make appropriate decisions.

Strategy execution is also full of surprises - unplanned events, such as COVID-19, social media storms, unexpected product failures etc. – that require the ability to look beyond the known objectives and key results to track unexpected trends, such as spikes in social media, rapid increases in customer complaints for unknown reasons, etc.

What Viva can do…

Viva Goals, again, is key. Goals is designed to be able to harvest information directly from source systems, capture leaders’ commentary and provide meaningful reports in conjunction with Power BI. This provides ongoing feedback on the likelihood of achieving the strategic objectives, identifying areas where leadership needs to focus resources and where recognition should be given.

Copilot helps with the known (strategic goals) by providing deeper insights and recommended solutions. It becomes another powerful voice at leadership’s disposal, extending beyond the organization’s wisdom.

Copilot can help with the unknown too - its ability to monitor trends 7x24 and test current performance against historic performance, trends and events, allows it to provide leadership with early warning about potential issues. By leveraging Syntex, Copilot can even make some recommendations about who should be informed of these unexpected events, and even help set up meetings and agendas.

There's information available beyond transactional data from systems like Dynamics 365, Outlook or Teams. For example, information about who's attending what meetings, what individuals, teams and departments are allocating focus time, where we're seeing higher employee absenteeism and turnover etc. All of these are symptomatic of underlying issues that may be beyond your strategic plans but critical for leadership to understand.

Explicit research can be done using tools like Glint and Pulse to determine, in the flow of business, how employees perceive their work.

Benefits

The ability to capture performance correctly communicate them across their organization is critical to the strategy execution. Equally important is being protected against the unexpected.

We see organizations who manage through OKR's see, on average, a 20% performance improvement.

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Taking action and running great meetings

As Yogi Berra once said, “After all is said and done, more is said than is done”.

The bane of most meetings is that agreements are made in the meeting, but never followed up on - and we find ourselves discussing the same issue in the next meeting. This triggers yet more meetings on the same topic, operational cost, opportunity costs, and demotivation.

How Viva helps…

Viva Goals allows you to capture the agreed to tasks, timing, and accountability, then monitor their completion, and sees their impact on organization performance.

Insights allows us visibility into the effectiveness of meetings and their outcomes.

Pulse allows us targeted readings on performance, culture, attitudes, and impressions.

Benefits

Meetings are the most powerful tool in an organization's tool set, yet probably the least engineered! It is here that wisdom from multiple functions and previous experience can be focused on the important issues for the organization. If the reporting department could have solved the problem themselves, they would have done so already. Meetings become the secret tool to solve performance issues.

Organizations that run effective meetings see a 30% reduction in the number of meetings and a 50% reduction in the time spent in meetings. The time saving alone is a huge cost savings let alone the better decisions that get made.

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Conclusion

As they focus on their responsibilities, the CEO’s (and Executive Committee’s) needs are distinctly different than any other area of the organization. Viva provides a proven suite of tools to help them get their job done!

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