MANAGEMENT SPECIAL Why implementation matters
How important is the way you implement a major change
effort? We surveyed more than 2,000 global executives to find out—and to learn
from the best.
Implementation
matters. That may
be no surprise to executives who have lived through the challenges of actually
executing strategies and major change programs. But what may surprise you is
just how much impact implementation has on a range of measures of corporate
health.
Our global survey on implementation asked
executives about seven core implementation capabilities and 21 specific
underlying practices identified as the most critical to success by McKinsey’s
Implementation Capability Assessment. The results were striking. Good
implementers—defined as companies where respondents reported top-quartile
scores for their implementation capabilities—are 4.7 times more likely than
those at the bottom-quartile companies to say they ran successful change
efforts over the past five years. Respondents at the good implementers also
score their companies around 30 percent higher on a series of
financial-performance indexes.
Perhaps most important, the good-implementer
respondents say their companies sustained twice the value from their
prioritized opportunities two years after the change efforts ended, compared
with those at poor implementers . After all, every company “leaks” value at
various stages of the implementation process. Some opportunities that are
prioritized will not be implemented. Others will be implemented but will not
achieve bottom-line impact. A final set may achieve bottom-line impact, but it
will not be sustained. Yet good implementers retain more value at every
stage of the process than poor implementers do, and the impact is significant.
So what can we learn from them?
Secrets of the world’s best implementers
Almost by definition, good implementers outscore
poor implementers by a significant margin on all of the seven core capabilities
in our Implementation Capability Assessment—which the survey results confirm Yet beyond these aggregate results, our
extensive work with companies in implementation and the survey itself point to
some specific practices common to the world’s best implementers. Let’s look at
just three examples:
·
Ownership and commitment
Leaders devote appropriate time and energy to
support major change, often clearing their diaries to drive efforts in a
hands-on manner and inspire their colleagues. They also role model the right
behaviors to support the change, commonly by demonstrating the difficult act of
making personal behavioral changes.
·
Prioritization and planning
Line managers use tools such as value-driver
trees to ensure employees spend the majority of their time on the
organization’s priorities. They communicate at all levels about which actions
and outcomes are most important to the organization’s shareholders, customers,
and other stakeholders, and they have set intervals to review individual
efforts toward the organization’s priorities.
·
Accountability
Line managers eliminate performance variability
through tight monitoring and quick responses. This includes effectively using
key performance indicators that the organization tracks at the right frequency,
conducting regular performance discussions with teams, and regularly assessing
employees against individual goals and targets.
Similar examples can be identified across the
remaining four core capabilities. Finally, one cross-cutting secret of the
world’s best implementers is their belief that implementation is an individual
discipline that can be improved over time. Top-quartile implementers manifest
this belief by having a higher proportion of experienced change leaders run
their programs relative to other companies. In fact, the survey respondents at
good implementers are 1.4 times more likely than those at poor implementers to
say they have personally led multiple change efforts.
Executives and line managers around the globe
often lament their organizations’ implementation capabilities. Our survey
underlines what’s at stake, but it also has good news: there is a clear path to
improving implementation capabilities by understanding the practices that
matter, prioritizing them in your organization, and building them
systematically.
Raphael
Pustkowski is a consultant in McKinsey’s Sydney office,
where Jesse Scott is an associate principal and Joseph
Tesvic is a principal.
FOR
THE FULL ARTICLE WITH EXHIBITS SEE http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/operations/Why_implementation_matters?cid=other-eml-alt-mip-mck-oth-1408
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