Shapecast Strategy Management Office (SMO)

Your accelerated path to develop measurable strategy execution capability with fully managed strategy execution services designed to build capability in your team.

Book an introductory call

What is a Strategy Management Office (SMO)?

The Strategy Management Office (SMO) is a critical function which has the responsibility to ensure the objectives and performance measures of the organisation are well defined, there is a clearly chosen strategic path and the organisation executes the strategy well.

It leads the process of creating clarity of the future of the organisation, helping the executive team to select the best strategic path, and then turn the strategy in to an efficient, execution plan throughout the organisation.

Once the strategy starts executing, the SMO function ensures the strategy remains agile and tactical changes can be made quickly and efficiently as the markets and environment change.

The SMO is the foundation of ensuring your strategy executes successful and turns the 75% - 90% failure rate in to 90% success.

Organisations that implement a Strategy Management Office are 2.8x more likely to execute their strategy successfully.

Ask yourself...

Who is responsible for ensuring that our strategy is well-designed & that our organisation understands it?
Who is responsible for selecting and designing the right KPIs that efficiently drive our organisation's performance?
Is our executive team's remuneration aligned with our strategic goals and KPIs?
Who ensures we have the right strategy execution capability to be successful?
Who makes sure all the work we do aligns to the strategy and helps prioritise what is important against the strategy?
Do we have an up to date, single view of the strategy so we can make fast, accurate decisions when things inevitably change?

If the answer to these questions is unclear in your organisation, then you could be a great fit for a Strategy Management Office.

What does a Strategy Management Office (SMO) do?

Strategy Analysis

Analysing your markets, identifying important trends, threats, opportunities for significant growth and transformation.

Outcome & Performance Measure Design

Clarifying goals, objectives and creating clear focussed KPI and Key Results which are then federated and owned throughout the organisation.

Strategy Execution Design

Once outcomes have been defined and a strategic path has been chosen, the next step is designing how the organisation will execute the strategy.

Strategy Execution Capability Development

A big part is ensuring the organisation has the skills, experiences and capabilities to successfully execute the strategy.

Managing Performance & Prioritisation

Once the strategy moves from design and in to execution there is a significant focus on managing and governing ongoing performance, and focussing on what are the priorities that drive the biggest contribution to outcomes.

Strategy Acceleration

A major aspect of successful execution is on the removal of dependencies, blockers and finding ways to accelerate delivery of the strategy so that objectives and benefits can be realised early.

Driving strategic value

One of the most important roles of the SMO is ensuring that all the work happening drives the most strategic value and this value can be tracked transparently.

Tactical adjustment and optimisation

The primary role of the SMO is making sure the execution of the strategy is continually optimised and fine tuned. This relies on real time, up to date, accurate information.

I want to execute my strategy faster.

Book an introductory call

Strategy Management Office Frequently Asked Questions

How does the SMO differ from a Programme Management Office (PMO)?

The SMO makes sure the organisation's strategy is well designed, and supports the achievement of goals. It is focussed on ensuring the portfolio is prioritised to deliver the strategy and importantly, that there is strategy execution capability across the organisation.

The project or portfolio management office (PMO) ensures that projects and programmes complete successfully to time, cost and quality. However, the PMO typically doesn't ensure the portfolio is the right one to deliver on the strategic goals of the company.

How does the SMO work alongside the PMO?

The SMO and PMO are highly complimentary functions. The SMO is focussed the entire strategy lifecycle and ensuring the strategy can be executed. It builds the tools, methods and frameworks to ensure the strategy is successful. The PMO is focussed on the detailed delivery of the programmes and projects. The SMO should guide and lead the PMO's work.

What processes should the SMO manage?

It should support the analysis of markets to identify trends, opportunity and risk. It should lead the process to determine objectives and performance measures (KPIs or OKRs). It should support the selection of the best strategy to achieve the objectives. It then designs the successful approach to execute the strategy across the organisation.

It should focus on implementing the right tools, frameworks and processes that ensure that all aspects of the strategy are executed and leads the strategy process across the organisation.

How big should the SMO be?

The size (number of people) within an SMO depends on the organisation, its complexity and maturity. SMOs can range from a small number of senior, individuals that understand strategy and can influence the organisation to a full, multi-skilled team that leads the strategy implementation, tools, processes and governance.

What technologies should the SMO use?

To be effective and to enable the SMO to focus on leading the strategy, it should make good use of industry leading strategy execution tools which can create the single view of all work supporting the strategy and can provide real time reporting and analytics that drives fast, effective data-driven decisions. Critically, this means the SMO can spend their time focussing on the execution of strategy, making tactical changes, reassigning strategic resource and planning capability implementation rather than lower value tasks of collating information and reporting.

We recommend StrategyWorks which is the industry-leading strategy execution tool.

What is the ROI for a Strategy Management Office?

The SMO should provide a huge, strategic return on investment. Returns come from greatly reducing the amount of work the organisation performs on non-strategic projects and programmes.

The biggest impact it makes is by accelerating the time to achieve objectives, including revenue, growth, profitability and market penetration.

By speeding up the time to achieve these goals and reducing wasted spend, the SMO should expect at least a 10x ROI.

SMO Overview in 2 mins

How to implement a Strategy Management Office (SMO)

If you are looking for ways to implement a Strategy Management Office there are few options but which is the right one for you?

OPTION 1

Do It Yourself (DIY)

Building and developing strategy execution capability is a daunting task especially if your organisation is starting from a position of relatively low maturity.

While its the best long term solution, it can take a long time and lots of energy to get to a point where you have the right embedded tools, skills and processes to be effective. This option is right for organisations that have a long time to make the change but want to build long term capability.

Worse still, internal politics can make this change extremely challenging.

Good

Long term capability build

Bad

Slow
Can be difficult to implement the right processes and people.
Frameworks, tools, processes have to all be planned, integrated and deployed internally.
Politics and vested interests can hamper progress.

OPTION 2

StrategyWorks SMO

StrategyWorks Strategy Management Office is designed to give you all of the benefits of acceleration in process, technology and resources but focuses exclusively on building your strategy execution capability for the long term.

This new option is designed to give you the best of both world and we firmly believe its the only way to give you immediate traction and long term gain.

Good

A rapid injection of horsepower & strategy delivery acceleration
Provides out of the box, proven best practice tooling, processes and frameworks.
Measurably builds capability in your team.
Builds on your detailed knowledge of markets and customers.
Leaves a powerful legacy of strategy execution capability for the long term.

Bad

More expensive than the DIY option initially, however, any investment is returned many times by the growth and acceleration delivered.

OPTION 3

Traditional Consultancy

When you or the board are frustrated with progress and find change difficult, the traditional option is to engage a familiar named strategy firm.

Maybe a tier 1 consulting firm or a management consulting firm, less specialised but with a deep bench.

This can bring immediate horsepower, but its very often very expensive, often up to half a million per week for a modest team. These providers can be difficult to control, and worse still, the capability walks out of the door when the funds run out.

Good

Provides a quick injection of horse power and resource.
Can be a safer route given the brand name.

Bad

Can be very expensive.
Challenging to control.
Consulting won’t understand your business and market as well as you and your team.
Provides no/limited lasting capability.
Typically provision of resources only with limited proven strategy frameworks, processes or integrating tooling.

StrategyWorks Strategy Management Office

Our Strategy Management Office (SMO) is designed to help you accelerate your design, implementation and ongoing management of your strategy.

We turn your chances of strategy execution success from 20% to 90%.

We combine proven strategy frameworks with our strategy execution tooling StrategyWorks and a complete implementation methodology.

Together, these accelerate your maturity, reduce time to design and implement your strategy while building lasting capability in your organisation.

Shapecast Strategy Management Office Services

A significant factor is having a successful strategy is creating clear outcomes and performance measures.

We have developed a structured process to help you create clear outcomes and the effective performance measures that really move the needle.

Outcome Planning

A significant factor is having a successful strategy is creating clear outcomes and performance measures.

Our structured process help you create clear outcomes and the right performance measures that really move the needle on performance.

Strategy Execution Design

Once outcomes are clarified and agreed we use proven Strategy Alignment Frameworks to design the implementation approach across your organisation. This means creating the right initiatives, programs and project, then linking outcomes to performance.

Strategy Management

Once the strategy has started executing, we provide details reporting and analytics on all aspects of the strategy and help you to drive fast, data driven decisions as the environment changes.

Agile strategy is the most important factor in success at the execution stage.

Execution Capability Build

We believe its critical that organisations have the capability and tools to execute your own strategy successfully long-term.

A big part of our work is measuring and developing capability in your teams. We measure current capability and implement active plans to build out skills, processes and capability in your teams.

Strategy Execution Tooling

StrategyWorks is the industry leading strategy execution tool. It provides a single view of your entire strategy.

We take care of all aspects of StrategyWorks implementation and management so you can focus on executing.

Strategy Acceleration

Strategy Acceleration is a critical aspect of the value we provide.

Accelerating strategy execution leads to reduced costs and importantly earlier time to reach goals. This in turn drives compounding benefits.

“What was important to us was that StrategyWorks wasn't just some point tool. It was a whole methodology, toolset and framework that enabled us to be successful with our strategy.”

Derek Holder, CEO (global media organisation)

StrategyWorks Strategy Execution Software

A single view of your strategy

As part of our Strategy Management Office, we include StrategyWorks which is the industry-leading strategy execution software. It is designed to create a complete, single view of your strategy linking all the work you do to the outcomes and goals you are trying to achieve.

It is a game-changing technology which enables us to radically accelerate your strategy delivery, reporting and time to achieve objectives. Importantly it gives everyone across the organisation complete clarity on their role in delivery of the strategy and how they can contribute.

StrategyWorks gives you the golden thread from execution to outcome, enabling you to bridge the strategy to execution gap. It compliments our strategy design and enables to you be in complete control of your strategy.

Fully managed implementation

We fully take care of the deployment, set up, integration and ongoing management of StrategyWorks so you and your teams can focus your energy on executing the strategy.

To find out more about StrategyWorks or arrange a demo.

More about StrategyWorks

Building strategy execution capability in your team

To be successful at execution for the long term, it is important to be able to build capability in your teams. Relying on third parties to drive strategic change never works long term.

So a major part of our work is helping you to measure you current capability and develop detailed plans to build capability in all of the critical areas of strategy execution.

We have developed a unique execution maturity framework that we use to measure, plan and enhance your complete execution capability over time. We then use this to develop a practical plan of changes to your skills, experiences, frameworks and systems. We then measure how well you are improving over time.

All changes and improvements are actively tracked within StrategyWorks alongside your strategic implementation programmes.

Book an introductory call

The unique blend of strategy execution tools, frameworks, experience and processes is uniquely designed to accelerate your strategy and build lasting capability for the future.