Jibility The Preview

ROADMAPS

Chris Benthien, Chuen Seet & the Jibility Team

Published in 2018 by Jibility Pty Ltd

Level 1, 111 Colin Street, West Perth Western Australia WA 6005

www.jibility.com

ISBN 978-0-6483868-0-3

Text copyright © Jibility Pty Ltd 2018

Diagrams copyright © Jibility Pty Ltd 2018

The moral right of the author has been asserted

© All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon, or similar organization), in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Some of the people or organizations in this book have had their names changed to protect their identity.

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Foreword

So why did we create Jibility? For the last twenty-five years, we have consulted to many organizations, helping them to develop their business and technology strategies, from large multinationals to regional companies and right through to small not-for-profits. We have worked in unison with their leadership teams using a wide variety of leading strategy tools and theories (of which there are hundreds, if not thousands). We documented these strategies in great detail and helped to communicate the strategy to their team and key stakeholders. We left these organizations all prepped and primed to execute. The clients were excited about the direction they were about to embark on, and the staff eagerly awaited the change that was about to come. We were also excited for them – there were high fives all round!

And then we come back to these organizations after a year or so had passed. What we found was that while a few had executed amazingly well on their strategy, most had not. The easy, business-as-usual stuff had generally been done, but anything that required the organization to change was languishing.

There was nothing wrong with the strategy. All of the companies felt that it was the right way forward, they had just failed to effect the changes in their organization necessary to implement it.

So, we started to explore the reasons why our clients had not progressed as well as they wanted to. Common reasons were:

“We understood the strategy, but we didn’t know how to start.”

“The strategy was too broad. In hindsight, we needed to focus on a few big key challenges.”

“We couldn’t execute our strategy because we weren’t equipped to do it.”

“Each Department ran off and started to execute; we weren’t united in our efforts.”

“The parts of the strategy which fell to one function in our organization generally progressed, but anything that was crossfunctional failed to get off the starting blocks.”

“We need to get our house in order before we could execute. We didn’t.”

“The strategy sounded great, but we didn’t really know what to do next. We needed a simple roadmap of what to do to.”

“We started kicking off projects everywhere. We soon had too much on our plate and things started to fall through the cracks. We just tried to do too much too soon.”

“We filled up our portfolio with a mountain of projects. But a lot of these we couldn’t really relate back to our strategy. It seemed like everyone’s pet project seemed to creep onto the agenda.”

“We’ve done a lot of projects but we’re not sure where this has taken us. We needed something to show us the way between our strategy and the stuff we execute everyday.”

“We couldn’t agree priorities as an Executive. I think the staff got confused as to what they should be focusing on. To be honest I was confused as to what the priorities were.”

“We just needed to keep it simple. We made the execution too complex.”

The pattern we kept observing was a difficulty in coherently navigating from a high-level articulation of the business strategy to a detailed articulation of the coordinated myriad of initiatives and tactical actions necessary to actually implement the strategy.

We kept looking for a simple method for taking a high-level business strategy and turning it into a focused roadmap for execution. We failed to find anything that did the job simply.

And so Jibility was born.

A simple method for helping organizations to clarify their key objectives, assess the capabilities to be established or changed to realize those objectives, and then build a simple, but highly focused roadmap that can be followed to make it all happen.

While the original goal with Jibility was to provide a simple method that would assist medium to large businesses to create practical roadmaps for their business and IT strategies, we’ve since found it works for all sorts of applications: for startups, for not-for-profits, for community organizations, for individual projects, and even for creating personal life plans! The possibilities are endless!

Strategic Roadmaps

Jibility Defined

verb

to plan or to map out

noun

1. possession of the means or skill to do something

2. talent, skill, or proficiency in a particular area

jibility /jìˈbɪlɪti/

noun

possession of the skill and tool to plan or map out

Jibility is an amalgamation of two words: jì huà (计划), which is Chinese for “to plan or to map out”, and ability, which is “the possession of the means or skill to do something”. Thus, we get Jibility: “the possession of the skill and tool to plan or map out”.

Our belief is that the difference between mediocrity and raging success for many organizations is NOT down to a flawed strategy (quite the contrary: most organizations have a very sound strategy), but their ability to translate that strategy into action and then execute it.

Jibility is about providing a simple method to translate strategy into a coherent roadmap for execution.

So You’ve Got a Great Strategy… But What’s the Plan, Stan?

What do you do next

First Things First: Nail Your Strategy

A business or organization without a clear and concise strategy carries a huge risk. It is a pre-requisite for a good plan and roadmap.

You wouldn’t set off on a wilderness hike without a clear understanding of the destination. Without knowing the destination, you won’t know what challenges you are likely to encounter, what gear to pack, how long you will be on the trail, what capabilities you will need to develop to hike the trail, nor be able to create a trail map to safely reach the summit.

There are literally thousands of business strategy books, tools, courses and podcasts that will provide you with ideas, frameworks, tools and assistance to help clarify your overarching business model and strategy and set your destination. Jibility won’t help you create your business model or strategy. Jibility will, however, help you create the roadmap for your destination.

And so, if you have your destination set and your strategy nailed, you now need to put a roadmap in place to execute.

You should already be clear about your vision and mission, who your target customers are, what your unique value proposition is, and how you will sustainably compete. You should have deliberated over your product strategy, done your product portfolio assessment, and know which products you are focusing on. You should have a clear brand strategy and a good understanding of how you will cut through in the market with your message. Your macro business strategy should be relatively clear to everyone in your team.

Now you are ready to execute.

We believe that you need to make the planning process simple. In our time as consultants, we have helped create and review a great many strategic plans. From large multinationals to local startups, these planning documents are invariably heavy tomes that adorn the dusty shelves of offices worldwide, to be pulled out only when there is an audit, or the consultants arrive to produce the next three-year plan and they request a copy of the old one.

We were recently engaged to review the IT strategy and plan for a large healthcare provider. We were provided with a deck consisting of over three hundred and fifty slides prepared by a large consulting firm. This deck cost the organization several hundreds of thousands of dollars in consulting fees to prepare. In preparation for our review, we decided to distil the deck down to its essence by discarding any slide that didn’t actually articulate a key point of execution of the strategy.

We pulled out slide after slide of what we call “fillers”: slides articulating the benefits of innovation and current trends in global healthcare. The sort of stuff that any internet search would provide. Surprisingly, we reduced the deck to twelve slides. We then turned these twelve slides into two A3 infographics and presented them back to the client for confirmation before we proceeded to refine the plan and produce a roadmap for implementation. Many of the stakeholders confessed that this was the first time that they had really absorbed the strategy in its essence. This triggered a further round of debate, but at the end there was universal commitment across all stakeholder groups for the IT strategy. This level of commitment to the strategy wasn’t obviously there previously. Distilling the strategy down to its essence and making it visual boosted understanding and stakeholder commitment tenfold.

The strategy did have a plan for execution. Three of the slides articulated a Gantt chart of projects over the next three years that would implement the strategy. However, when we assessed the organization, the capacity to actually execute those projects was found to be minimal. No thought had been given to what capabilities the organization needed to execute those projects successfully. Furthermore, it wasn’t clear to us (or the client) how some of the projects related back to the client’s overarching strategy.

In essence, the strategy was sound. But…

The practical steps required to take it forward were not well understood or entirely clear. The result was organizational uncertainty and lack luster levels of commitment and enthusiasm amongst stakeholders.

Notably priorities were not clearly articulated. All projects were seemingly as important as each other and therefore a very large investment was required in the first year of implementation.

There was also no consideration given to the capabilities that the organization would need to invest in to enable its implementation of the strategy.

And most importantly, there was no high-level, coherent roadmap for coordinating execution; rather there was a series of disjointed projects, where for some the linkage back to the overarching strategy was somewhat tenuous.

What to do?

Time to pull out

PLANNING CANVAS

Jibility has six core steps that build on each other to create your roadmap for strategy execution. Together they articulate a simple and visual plan for moving forward that can be easily understood by your team, enabling them to execute with clarity and confidence. These six steps form the Jibility Canvas.

The Jibility Steps Challenges Objectives

Challenges

Challenges are either the major obstacles that must be overcome, or opportunities available to be seized, on the way to realizing our strategy.

Objectives

Objectives are the defined targets we need to achieve in order to address our challenges.

Capabilities

Capabilities are the key things we need to establish, improve on and invest in, so as to ensure we are enabled to achieve our objectives.

Actions

Actions are the specific actions to be executed to facilitate our target capabilities.

Initiatives

Initiatives are a logical collection of Actions that together deliver a strategic outcome.

Roadmap

A Roadmap is the sequencing of Initiatives into a realistic, achievable schedule based on the optimal balance of time, cost and risk.

JIBILITY

The Jibility Canvas represents a concise and highly adaptable plan for the implementation of your strategy.

Putting It All Together

The Jibility Canvas represents a concise and highly adaptable plan for the implementation of your strategy. The six steps provide you with a simple, visual planning framework that ensures clarity and focus on the core essentials of planning:

What are the major obstacles or challenges that you are likely to encounter in the execution of your strategy?

What are the most important things you need to do to surmount these challenges?

What capabilities must you have or excel at to meet your objectives?

What specific actions do you need to undertake to implement your targeted capabilities?

How do you organize your actions into initiatives that you can manage more easily?

Which initiatives should you undertake, in what order, within what timeframe, and how much will this cost?

to execute effectively. It is rare to encounter an organization that doesn’t have a strategy. Even if it’s poorly formed, the leadership can nearly always articulate what they consider to be the key theme or thrusts for their strategic direction; or at the very least what they feel they need to do to be successful. But the pathway forward to execute is usually not so clear. We often find the roadmap to implement the strategy is:

Complex and cumbersome, making it difficult for people to quickly and easily understand;

Fragmented, with each area of the organization often having conflicting plans;

Misaligned, with investment in initiatives not rationalized within the context of the overall organizational strategy; and

Missing a succinct view of the organizational capabilities that will need to be established to underpin and realize the strategy.

The lynch pin of the Jibility Canvas is capabilities. Executing strategy effectively requires investment in the right capabilities, in the right sequence at the right time. Investing in the wrong capabilities or investing too much or at the wrong time can lead to ineffective allocation of often scarce organizational resources. We work through capabilities and capability mapping in detail in later chapters.

Time and time again, the main issue we see organizations encounter is not knowing what to do, but NOT knowing how

And, sometimes we even find that the roadmap doesn’t even exist! The strategy may be clear, but there’s no plan as to how it will ever be implemented!

We believe that most organizations fail to reach their full potential, not because they don’t have a strategy, but because they are unable to build, maintain and execute a concise and clear plan for the implementation of their strategy.

Before you Begin, Clarify your Strategy

Before we dive into each of the Jibility steps, it’s important to ensure you are clear on your strategy. In this book we won’t teach you how to build your business strategy (there are literally thousands of excellent books that can already help you with this), but what we will say is that it is important that your strategy is succinctly summarized.

We commonly encounter the scenario where the strategy for an organization has been established, but it is not clearly understood by stakeholders, including parts of the leadership team. This can often be because the strategy is complex, or not communicated well or often enough, or held tightly with a few key executives, or simply has lost relevance because it is no longer current. Whatever the reason, before you embark on establishing your roadmap using Jibility, you need to ensure your business strategy is current, clear, concise and well understood. At the very least, you should be able to articulate the challenges that your strategy is seeking to address.

There are a multitude of tools and techniques you can use to fine tune and refresh your strategy. Some of our old favorites are:

Porter’s Five Forces

Porter’s Value Chain

SWOT

Norton Kaplan Strategy Map

Business and Value Proposition Canvases, by Alex Osterwalder and Yves Pegneur

Lean Business Canvas, by Ash Mauraya

Blue Ocean Strategy, by W Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne

BCG Product Matrix

This list just scratches the surface. There are literally thousands of other tools, techniques and theories you can adapt and use for articulating your strategy. In fact, there are so many, that a book has even been written to help you choose your preferred approach: Your Strategy Needs a Strategy, by Martin Reeves.

It can be complex, but thankfully creating a Jibility strategic roadmap is not.

When it comes to communicating your strategy, we are big fans of keeping it simple. Summarizing your strategy onto a large infographic is often a really great way of getting the message out there, but nothing beats the leadership of the organization talking to the team, investors and other stakeholders on a constant basis, reinforcing the direction in which the organization is heading.

Many aspects of your strategy may have a long-time horizon (such as your vision and mission, which generally will not change that often), whilst other aspects may have a shorter time horizon (a goal to improve market share). Therefore, before you embark on the creation of your roadmap, it is important to clarify the desired time horizon for the realization of your strategy as a reference point for framing the discussion.

Now that you have summarized your strategy and clarified the timeframe for your strategic roadmap, it’s time to start thinking about how you will go about executing it. So, let’s dive into each of the Jibility steps in detail.

Challenges

What are the key obstacles to overcome, opportunities to seize and problems to solve?

When thinking about your strategy (in particular, if you have set a bold strategy for a future state that is a significant stretch from your current position), you will immediately start to think about the many obstacles that you will need to overcome to be successful. Conversely, opportunities may spring to mind that you will be able to take advantage of, accelerating the achievement of your strategy.

For a large mature business, typical challenges might include “we need to be more innovative”, “our costs are too high”, “our market share is declining”, “our sales are slowing”, “we are in a position to acquire new businesses”, or “we have capital to invest in new products”.

At the other end of the scale, for a startup organization the challenges might be “access to capital”, “we need to grow market share”, “we need to scale our operations”, or “we need to find the right people”.

And for an organizational unit within a business, such as an IT department, the challenges might be more specific and include “we must stay ahead of cyber security threats”, “we have too much shadow IT”, “IT is not valued by business leaders” or “we have a significant opportunity to improve our business outcomes with new technology”.

Don’t forget to consider major opportunities as well as problems and obstacles.

Often when defining challenges, it’s better to start with the major opportunities rather than the obstacles or problems. People have a natural tendency to identify obstacles to success or reasons why something can’t be done, so if you don’t consciously think about opportunities upfront, you could easily end up with just a long list of problems.

Your list of possible challenges could be vast. Almost every day it seems that new challenges emerge: problems arise, opportunities for new ways of working present themselves, competitors change the playing field.

Try to keep the number of challenges to no more than five.

Listing lots of challenges may provide you with an accurate list of all the organization’s problems and opportunities, but let’s face it: with limited time and resources can you truly address all the challenges? Hence, determining the top challenges ensures that you and your team remain focused on the big-ticket items without getting lost in the weeds. And keeping focus is a critical factor in successful strategy execution. Some of the best examples of strategy execution we have experienced are when the challenges are distilled down to one or two. It provides focus, simplicity and a clarion call to people about what is needed for success.

Objectives

What are the most important things we must do to meet our challenges?

An objective is a result or outcome that your organization must deliver in order to address its challenges. Achieving your objectives should support the organization in realizing its strategy. Defining objectives clarifies the outcomes the strategic roadmap must deliver.

Objectives should be specific. They articulate an outcome that can be measured. For example, if you defined a major challenge of “attracting and retaining skilled people” then you might define an objective of “improve people retention to x%” or “improve recruitment attraction by x” or “double our investment in training and learning”. If a major challenge is “access to capital” then you might define an objective of “execute an IPO by x” or “secure $x millions of Series A funding by x”. If a major challenge is “staying ahead of cyber security threats” then an objective might be “establish a dedicated cyber security function” or “zero security breaches by x” or “increase cyber security awareness in the organization”.

More often than not you will want to understand your challenges before defining your objectives. However, it is possible that your objectives may be defined without the context of an explicit challenge. Perhaps you have previously defined or been given some specific objectives? In this case, the nature of the

You don’t always have to define your challenges before you define your objectives.

underlying challenges (opportunities or problems) implied by your defined objectives needs to be considered. If you can’t articulate the challenge that an objective relates to, then how can you assess whether an objective really is top priority?

Try to have only one or two objectives per challenge.

As with challenges, too many objectives can dilute your focus on what’s most important and confuse the message to your stakeholders. The more complex and expansive a strategic roadmap is, the more the delivery risk increases. Focusing on a set of key headline objectives facilitates clarity and purpose.

Try to have only one or two objectives per challenge. If practical, keep the overall number of objectives to no more than seven, which means no more than, say, five challenges. Again (we can’t stress this enough!), keeping focus is a critical factor in successful strategy execution. For example, a major mining company we have worked with ensured focus by defining only three core objectives: “Zero Fatalities”, “Tons mined per year of x” and “a cost per ton of $x”. These objectives were designed to meet the challenges at the time of “rising demand from China”, “falling commodity prices” and “fatalities and safety issues threatening sustainability”.

Capabilities

What capabilities do we need to invest in to reach our objectives?

The building blocks of an organization are often described in physical terms, such as the number of shops, warehouses or trucks. Sometimes the building blocks are described from a people perspective, like the number of staff, the skills or roles and organization structure. We can also describe an organization in terms of the process or the way the business works, such as the supply chain flow or the way customers interact with the organization’s online shop.

Capability building blocks are another way of viewing your organization. Instead of viewing your organization as distinct physical, people or process building blocks, we combine them together into single logical building blocks. So, a capability in its simplest form is an articulation of the combined resources, capacities and abilities (people, process and physical) describing what the organization or business does.

A capability is a core building block of an organization and is a combination of physical things, processes and people.

For example, “customer service management”, “software development” and “product development” are all capabilities. Each of these capabilities imply a people, process and physical dimension. For example, encapsulated within the capability of software development, there are people like developers and solution architects; processes like Agile methodology; and physical assets like software tools and hardware. A capability describes the what – not the how or who.

Building Your Capability Map

When describing the capabilities of an organization or business, you can simply list them, but once you have over twenty capabilities it becomes difficult to understand the relationships between them and even harder to communicate this with your colleagues. So, it is strongly advisable at this stage to establish a capability map. A capability map is a simple visual representation of all of the capability building blocks of your organization that you can manipulate to achieve your strategy. Visualizing capabilities using a simple map assists with rapid identification of the capabilities required for an organization and, more importantly, is used to model which capabilities need to be established, improved or replaced to achieve your strategy.

A capability may be broken down into sub-capabilities. For example, a product development capability might be broken down as:

1. Product Development (level 1)

1.2 Research and Development (level 2)

1.2. Regulatory Approval

1.3. Pricing Strategy

1.4. Product Manufacturing

1.5. Product Launch

You can break down capabilities further:

1. Product Development (level 1)

1.1. Research and Development (level 2)

1.1.1. Ideation (level 3)

1.1.2. Product Mock-up

1.1.3. Concept Testing

1.1.4. Prototyping

Keeping your capability map simple is best. Going beyond two or three levels of sub-capabilities is rarely required and keeping it succinct means that you maintain focus on what’s important.

Keep your capability map succinct. Don’t go beyond two or three levels of sub-capabilities unless you really need to.

Don’t overthink your capabilities or worry too much about their strict definitions. Just put down what you think it is your organization does that will be impacted by your strategy. Remember: a capability describes WHAT you do. Not who, how or why. Sometimes a capability map may end up looking similar to an organizational structure; this is because organizational structure is usually based on supporting business function. For example, you may have a finance capability that is managed by a finance department – same name, but very different things. A capability map often reflects the value chain of an organization and certainly when identifying capabilities at the very top level it is useful to take a value chain approach as a starting point for identifying capabilities.

END OF PREVIEW

© All rights reserved, 2018. Jibility Pty Ltd

STRATEGIC

Jibility’s book is your essential guide to the concepts, methods and techniques behind strategic roadmaps. Complete with lively case studies and examples, we’ve distilled our years of experience and expertise into an easy, engaging read.

Insights from our years of strategy consulting

Tap into the experience of our world-class consultants who have developed and delivered strategic roadmaps for some of the world’s leading organizations.

Real life examples

Understand what does and doesn’t work in the real world when creating a successful strategic roadmap, all within the context of the latest thinking and approaches.

Simple method

Access our simple method for strategic roadmaps, which makes sense of valuable techniques like capability-based planning.

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