ORK Consulting And Implementation Services

Build Strategic Plans With Consulting Services that Drive Success

For some organizations, a lengthy strategic planning process leads to a plan that is rarely put into action to serve business needs.

Strategic planning is a process that requires dozens of hours across top-level levels of leadership every fiscal year. Yet, many leaders find that their carefully crafted plans don’t provide enough value for the effort.

For some organizations, an intricate, lengthy strategic plan is finished, and then quickly put on a shelf to gather dust, rarely referred to or put into action to serve business needs. For others, conditions and goals change so rapidly that, by the time the strategic plan is done, the goal post has already shifted.

We help organizations build actionable strategic plans, support vertical and horizontal communication, and generate momentum across employee groups to achieve success. We are certified to train and implement the Objective and Key Results (OKRs) methodology, but can support a range of strategic planning processes.

Strategic Planning and OKR Consulting Services

Organizing to Win

A famous Mark Twain quote states: “I didn’t have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one.” Being concise and focused requires time and energy, but this exercise is invaluable when it comes to strategic plans to ensure that organizations are focused on what’s important and clear and what teams can afford to deprioritize. We help leaders build clear and direct plans that enable their organizations to prioritize and drive the most important initiatives for success.

Facilitating Two-Way Communication

Strategic plans that cascade slowly from the top down lose out on key opportunities. First, they insulate leadership from a true, on-the-ground sense of what’s truly possible and what’s required for their plans to succeed. Second, they aren’t able to engender ownership from practitioners who can feel disenfranchised from being able to influence their business. We help organizations build effective two-way communication into their strategic planning process to generate buy-in and calibrate their pathway to success.

Designing Communication Campaigns

Strategic plans, when created right, not only codify the priorities of the business, they also serve as a rallying point for the broader organization to engage with the direction of the business. We work with partners to evaluate organizational culture and design plans to roll out strategy to stakeholder and employee groups with messages that generate engagement and alignment.

Training and Implementing OKR Methodology

There are many popular methodologies for creating strategic plans. The Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) approach can be ideal for organizations seeking ruthless prioritization, principled measurement, and organization-wide transparency. We partner with organizations on this methodology wherever they are in their OKR journey, whether just starting out or preparing for their next year of OKR planning.

Sample OKR Strategy and Implementation Consulting Partnership

Designing and communicating strategy that serves the business via OKRs

Client industry: Healthcare/Pharmaceuticals

Size: $500M revenue, 3000 employee business unit within a $10B revenue, 50,000 employee organization

Challenge: A fast-moving, high-innovation business unit found that it was losing significant value due to rework, missed deadlines, and wasted effort, with multiple teams pursuing overlapping workstreams.

Root Need Uncovered: Low awareness and understanding of organizational priorities had led to a lack of effective prioritization across teams (“rowers rowing at different speeds and in different directions”). In addition, the pace of work complicated teams’ ability to communicate across silos.

Prescribed Services:

Analysis of company culture and employee engagement to uncover areas of greatest mutual identity for change management campaign
Assessment of greatest cross-team challenges to communication and pathways of greatest influence
OKR Train-the-trainer development for 50 functional managers
Facilitated OKR sessions for top two leadership layers (8 teams total)

Development of “OKR Handbook” of best practices for implementation and reinforcement