The book presents some of the cases where we have facilitated and coached major clients to reach important business objectives. The focus is for once on our involvement as facilitators and coaches. Nonetheless, it also mentions the type of results obtained by the clients and the challenges leading to our involvement.
Our principles for agile strategic management and documented standards made the service rendered a sound long-term investment for our clients.
People, organization, and communication are the pivot points of our methods. Building teams with people who can and will accomplish exceptional results is great fun as well as a great challenge that has made our effort worthwhile.
In order to support the motivation of the people involved with strategic initiatives we have used processes of teambuilding and solution implementation that make their contribution so visible that they want to take ownership of intermediate and final results.
I believe the book can contribute to prevent at least some problems with strategic initiatives in public and private organizations of all sizes.
The real life experiences that the book contains are not always success stories. It also tells about major blunders and about how to avoid the pitfalls that one meets while governing strategic initiatives.
It will please me if you find the book inspiring and even fun reading.
It is not the ultimate way to ensure a high quality strategy—just some ideas based on experience from strategic initiatives that my companies or I have managed, coached, and facilitated based on our specific methods.
You can use the book to look up “how to” examples chapter by chapter that explain various ways to use the agile methods and techniques that we have experienced; e.g.:
Chapter 1 presents an overview of what strategic initiatives and agile strategy management is about.
Chapter 2 presents how strategic initiatives can be organized for optimal communication and agile governance.
Chapter 3 presents how the detailed objectives of strategic initiatives can be defined for optimal program and project management.
Chapter 4 presents how to procure competent solution providers in such a way that you can ensure the quality of the solutions they deliver.
Chapter 5 presents how you can implement solutions that ensure the success of your strategic initiatives.
Chapter 6 presents how you can ensure the long-term benefits of your strategic initiatives.
Chapter 7 gives you an overview of the main conclusions and ideas presented in the book.
In all chapters you find pertinent business cases that explain how to establish organizations for change and how to ensure that these intermediate organizations stay motivated until final solution delivery.
The quality management methods that contribute to the agility of the methods and techniques will probably capture the interest of corporate quality and strategy managers, and implementers of solution components.
Other ways you can use the book are:
Managers on all levels can read the book for inspiration—and hopefully be amused.
Some organizations might want to implement the presented methods, techniques, and standards as part of their own methodology.
The book is not a textbook because it does not pretend to tell you how to do your job; but it does show you what we have done under specific circumstances that are probably not very different from what you will meet in your job.
I hope the book will give inspiration to leaders, managers, and other people in organizations who get involved with and who want to maintain or improve their current corporate strategy through strategic initiatives.
It will please me if the ideas and experiences that are presented here with real life case stories are relevant to your needs.