The Problem With Strategy Mapping

A strategy map is a diagram that shows your organization's strategy on a single page. It’s great for quickly communicating big-picture objectives to everyone in the company. With a well-designed strategy map, every employee can know your overall strategy and where they fit in. It helps keep everyone on the same page, and it allows people to see how their jobs affect the company’s strategic objectives.

The Issue with Strategy Mapping:

The fault with strategy mapping lies in its static nature. As soon as a well thought out strategy has been written down, the world has changed - maybe not enough to make the diagram obsolete, but at least enough to bring the validity of the document into question. Additionally, strategy mapping suffers from the ivory tower syndrome. When leaders and their ideas and decision making become so far removed from the workforce, their work product is often dismissed as “out of touch” or “irrelevant”, regardless of quality. Strategy maps that have been created in brown paper sessions, documented by consultants in PowerPoint and sent around in an email will never create the desired business impact.

There is a better way to do it.

The Future of Strategy Mapping:

It is likely that you or parts of your organization are working with a variety of strategy mapping techniques. After all, it isn’t new to harness strategy mapping to communicate goals and objectives; what is (relatively) “new” is that the concept of connecting strategy maps to the broader operational working of your organization by connecting strategy to business processes, projects, as well as KPIs and documenting these relationships in a dynamic software platform. This means that strategy maps would no longer be standalone pieces of content locked away in a PowerPoint, but that they become living, breathing parts of your organization.

In reality, this means that you will be able to measure your organization’s progress towards pre-defined goals. You will also be able to continuously manage the impact of change. For example, what if the latest CRM re-implementation doesn’t succeed? Which business goals will that impact? And most importantly, by managing your strategy maps in a dynamic platform, you will be able to communicate your organization’s strategic direction to the workforce so that they understand how their daily work contributes to the overall progress of your organization.

How Mavim Supports Strategy Mapping

Mavim offers a series of pre-configured frameworks that support internal & external analysis. We also support concurrent use of multiple frameworks and even the creation of specialized, unique frameworks. This helps every part of your organization by allowing them to leverage the framework or model that best suits their specific needs. Below you will see a short list of some of the pre-configured frameworks we offer via our partners, and some of the open source, industry standard best practice models that can be purchased along with our software.

Via partners we offer:

• D.Quarks: The Building Blocks of Digital Transformation
• The Business Transformation Framework
• Industry Standards such as:
• Business Model Canvas
• Customer Journey Mapping
• Business Capability Mapping (CMMI)
• APQC Process Classification Framework
• Balanced Scorecard