Strategy implementation is the translation of chosen strategy into organizational action so as to achieve strategic goals and objectives. Strategy implementation is also defined as the manner in which an organization should develop, utilize, and amalgamate organizational structure, control systems, and culture to follow strategies that lead to competitive advantage and a better performance. Organizational structure allocates special value developing tasks and roles to the employees and states how these tasks and roles can be correlated so as maximize efficiency, quality, and customer satisfaction-the pillars of competitive advantage. But, organizational structure is not sufficient in itself to motivate the employees.

An organizational control system is also required. This control system equips managers with motivational incentives for employees as well as feedback on employees and organizational performance. Organizational culture refers to the specialized collection of values, attitudes, norms and beliefs shared by organizational members and groups.

Follwoing are the main steps in implementing a strategy:

• Developing an organization having potential of carrying out strategy successfully.

• Disbursement of abundant resources to strategy-essential activities.

• Creating strategy-encouraging policies.

• Employing best policies and programs for constant improvement.

• Linking reward structure to accomplishment of results.

• Making use of strategic leadership.

Excellently formulated strategies will fail if they are not properly implemented. Also, it is essential to note that strategy implementation is not possible unless there is stability between strategy and each organizational dimension such as organizational structure, reward structure, resource-allocation process, etc.

Strategy implementation poses a threat to many managers and employees in an organization. New power relationships are predicted and achieved. New groups (formal as well as informal) are formed whose values, attitudes, beliefs and concerns may not be known. With the change in power and status roles, the managers and employees may employ confrontation behaviour.

Concept Of Strategy Implementation

Strategy implementation is "the process of allocating resources to support the chosen strategies". This process includes the various management activities that are necessary to put strategy in motion, institute strategic controls that monitor progress, and ultimately achieve organizational goals.

Implementing The Strategy And Evaluating The Results

Thomas V. Bonoma suggests that successful implementation of strategies requires four basic types of execution skills:

* Interacting skills are expressed in managing one's own and others' behavior to achieve objectives.

* Allocating skills are brought to bear in managers' abilities to schedule tasks and budget time, money, and other resources efficiently.

* Monitoring skills involve the efficient use of information to correct any problems that arise in the process of implementation.

* Organizing skills are exhibited in the ability to create a new informal organization or network to match each problem that occurs.

General Framework For Strategy Implementation

The first step in implementation is identifying the activities, decisions, and relationships critical to accomplishing the activities.

There are six principal administrative tasks that shape a manager's action agenda for implementing strategy. In general, every unit of an organization has to ask, "What is required for us to implement our part of the overall strategic plan and how can we best get it done?".

The specific components of each of the six strategy-implementation tasks:

Building an organization capable of executing the strategy. The organization must have the structure necessary to turn the strategy into reality. Furthermore, the firm's personnel must possess the skill needed to execute the strategy successfully. Related to this is the need to assign the responsibility for accomplish key implementation tasks to the right individuals or groups.

Establishing a strategy-supportive budget. If the firm is to accomplish strategic objectives, top management must provide the people, equipment, facilities, and other resources to carry out its part of

the strategic plan. Further, once the strategy has been decided on, the key tasks to performed and kinds of decision required must be identified, formal plans must also be developed. The tasks should be arranged in a sequence comprising a plan of action within targets to be achieved at specific dates.

Installing internal administrative support systems. Internal systems are policies and procedures to establish desired types of behavior, information systems to provide strategy-critical information on a timely basis, and whatever inventory, materials management, customer service, cost accounting, and other administrative systems are needed to give the organization important strategy-executing capability. These internal systems must support the management process, the way the managers in an organization work together, as well as monitor strategic progress.

Devising rewards and incentives that are tightly linked to objectives and strategy. People and departments of the firm must be influenced, through incentives, constraints, control, standards, and rewards, to accomplish the strategy.

Shaping the corporate culture to fit the strategy. A strategy-supportive corporate culture causes the organization to work hard (and intelligently) toward the accomplishment of the strategy.

Exercising strategic leadership. Strategic leadership consists of obtaining commitment to the strategy and its accomplishment. It also involves the constructive use of power and politics, and politics in building a consensus to support the strategy.

Strategy And Structure

Each strategy has an associated organizational structure consistent with the strategy and diversification. These relationships are summarized in the tale below.

Strategy Structure

Single business Functional

Vertical by Products Functional with profit centers

Related businesses Divisional

Intermediate businesses Mixed structures

Unrelated Businesses Holding company

Problems Of Successful Implementation

Problems of successful implementation centre around how well or badly the existing organization responds and how adequate its reporting proves to be.

According to Arthur A. Owen, in practice there are four problem areas associated with the successful implementation of strategies:

The first problem is that, although strategies need to be developed around the business units (SBUs), of the corporation, these units often do not correspond to parts of the organizations structure. Business units have an external market-place for goods and services, and their management can plan and execute strategies independent of other pieces of the company. Moreover, the organization structure - and how that functions - derives from its history of take-over, tax considerations, shareholders considerations, economies of scale, personnel strengths and weaknesses, national legal requirements, and so on. Therefore, at any time strategy and structure need to be matched and supportive of each other.

Strategic planners must attempt to cut through the culture of diversified corporation and to plan in relation to the various competitive environments by identifying the strategies for them.

Moreover, these strategies still have to be implemented by the organization as a whole.

A second problem area is that traditional management reports are not sensitive enough to monitor the implementation strategies, thus the strategic manager not fully aware of what is happening. Hence the performance of existing structure is not monitored properly, and as a result control mechanisms may be ineffective.

Third, implementing strategy involves change, which in turn involves uncertainty and risk. Therefore, motivating managers to make changes is a key determinant.

Finally, management systems (such as compensation schemes, management development, communications systems and so on) are often in place as a result of past strategies; they are rarely tuned or revised to meet the needs of new ones.

Alexander adds additional factors that are also significant:

the failure to predict the time and problems which implementation will involve;

other activities and commitments that distract attention and possibly cause resources to be diverted;

that the bases upon which the strategies were formulated change, or were forecast poorly and

insufficient flexibility has been built in.

To counter these problems Owen suggests the following:

allocating clear responsibility and accountability for the success of the overall strategy project;

limiting the number of strategies pursued at any one time;

identifying actions to be taken to achieve the strategic objective, allocating detailed responsibilities for actions - and getting agreement for them;

identifying a lists of emilestonesl, or major intermediate progress points;

identifying key performance measures to be monitored throughout the life of the strategy project, and creating an information system to record progress.