Our Methodology
Simply stated, we do Strategic Alignment.
We align processes and people with your organization's strategies and goals. This achieves predictable results.
Our services all fit into at least one of four categories:
- Goals and Results
- Planning and Strategy
- Processes and Activities
- People Development
Click a category (or just scroll down) to learn about the methods we employ in each.
Goals And Results
Your arrow will hit the target toward which it is aimed. Results will happen without clear goals, but they will always be unpredictable.
You know goals are important, but setting goals with a freedom and clarity that propels your forward is a challenge.
Why? Because people see only what they recognize. We unknowingly lock ourselves into the familiar. We subconsciously ask only questions we know how to answer.
You can't grow that way. Growth requires change.
Strategic Alignment Group will help you break out of the familiar. We will help you develop goals that can lead to innovation so you can achieve great results you hadn't thought of before. We will also assist you in defining those results in clear, measurable terms so you know when you've hit the right target.
Everything Strategic Alignment Group does -- and helps you do -- emanates from a strict results-orientation. We call this End-Forward Alignment™. We begin by identifying desired results, then work step-by-step backward toward the beginning -- the Planning and Strategy that will achieve those results. We don't just "begin with the end in mind," we actually begin at the end and work toward the beginning. This approach generates greater insight, greater innovation, and more thorough development.
Planning and Strategy
You always arrive at the end of the road you traveled. Every leader intuitively realizes the critical importance of planning their course and creating a strategy to achieve their goals.
Yet few leaders do this well. Leaders typically fall into two camps -- Mental Planners and Overplanners.
Mental Planners have know what they want to accomplish, but they don't formalize their plans or the strategies that will get them there. This type of leader "figures it out" as they go along.
But the conscious mind can only hold so much at once. You can run to the local store for milk and eggs without directions or a list. But you couldn't drive to an unfamiliar city to shop at an unfamiliar store to buy a month's worth of groceries without directions and a list.
"Mental Planning" limits the amount your organization can achieve because of the limitations of the human mind.
Overplanners carefully think out their goals and what it takes to achieve them. They formalize their strategies to achieve those goals to the most miniscule detail. The documents they produce -- or that a highly paid consultant produced for them -- tend to be thick manuals that end up collecting dust on a shelf.
The problems with overplanning are many. Most notably, a highly structured and detailed plan is impossible to communicate well to the very people who are responsible for achieving it.
An overdeveloped plan also limits the organization's ability to respond to the unexpected variables that invariably appear.
Strategic Alignment Group believes every organization and every individual should know where they want to go and the roads they'll travel to get there. Depending on where you currently are we assist you in identifying core values, developing a vision that is achievable and measurable, defining critical success factors, and creating a formalized strategy to achieve your results.
What sets us apart is what will set you apart -- our method and our deliverables. We coach you through creating a strategy and operational plan. We participate in the process, but the final product is your own work, not ours. After all, you know your organization far better than we do!
Our deliverables are strategic plans that contain just the right amount of detail, are clear, are measurable, and are ready to communicate to every level of your organization.
Strategies, of course, are mobilized through processes and people.
Processes And Activities
If you don’t understand what you are doing as a process, you don’t understand what you are doing. Processes -- whether automated or human, in the office or in the factory -- are vehicles that carry your strategies toward results.
Our strategic alignment methods address both people and processes. We'll focus on Processes here. People will be addressed in the next section.
Process and Quality Improvement, as we approach it, is a management philosophy. It is centered on strategy, driven by management, focused on customers, and supported by employees.
If you need to be more competitive, more profitable, more productive, more flexible in meeting customer needs, and/or improve the speed of concept-to-profit, your processes are the first place to look.
Goal setting and strategic planning will uncover a lack of alignment between your people and processes and your goals and strategies. This is an important and positive disparity -- otherwise, you'd just be doing what you've always been doing.
Poor processes result in poor quality and decreased profitability:
- Quality of both marketable products and internal deliverables suffers because of variations/defects in output.
- Profitability suffers when operating processes include too much wasted time or materials.
Strategic Alignment Group provides a structured approach to resolving both of these. Depending on your specific need, help improve outcomes through Variation Reduction (Root Cause Analysis/Six Sigma) and pump up profitability through Cycle Time Reduction (Continuous Improvement/Lean).
We help you redesign how processes are performed by focusing on speed -- eliminating non-value-added steps and performing concurrent tasks.
In all cases, we work through committed senior management. Strategic Alignment Group acts as a steering group for specially trained teams. The teams diagnose the problem, recommend solutions and implement the approved solutions. Management directs the teams to focus on the critical or core processes that will produce desired and necessary results.
Our approach not only increases quality, productivity, and customer satisfaction. It also improves employee moral and loyalty and gets results much quicker than competitive approaches.
The result of our approach -- and what we believe sets us apart -- is that improvements become part of the very fabric of your organization, resulting in sustained change.
People Development
Corporate America spends billions of dollars each year to train employees with new knowledge and skills.
You know from experience that those new skills are generally applied for a short time, then things go back to "normal."
Why? Because the organization is much bigger than the individual. Without a changed organization, individual change is not sustainable. Organizational culture, ineffective systems and processes, and habits of thought affect individual behavior much more than training.
Strategic Alignment Group is different. We don't stop at training people, we develop people. We mobilize individuals to apply skills and knowledge they already possess toward improved results. Our focus is on the attitudes, habits, goals, strategies, and activities that enable those skills and knowledge to generate profit.
Our People Development processes include leadership development from Executives to Team Leaders as well as Management, Salesforce, Customer Service, Time Management, and Entrepreneurial Development.
As a way of giving back, we also provide a Youth Leadership Development process for ages 13-21, preparing young people for our future.
To learn more about Strategic Alignment Group LLC, call 330.465.0927 or follow
this link to contact us by email.
