This is a vital, often neglected stage in decision making, organizational change, and strategic management

Note Fortune 500 survey of the ten most frequent problems in implementing a major change (in descending order, with #1 most common):

1. More time needed for implementation than originally planned
2. Unanticipated major problems
3. Ineffective coordination of activities
4. Crises that distracted attention away from implementation
5. Insufficient capabilities of the involved employees
6. Inadequate training and instruction of lower-level employees
7. Uncontrollable external environmental factors
8. Inadequate leadership and direction by departmental managers
9. Poor definition of key implementation tasks and activities
10. Inadequate monitoring of activities by the information system

There is no question that poor implementation of an excellent strategy can guarantee failure of it. Although some organizational researchers have argued that excellent implementation may be able to rescue even a poor strategy, I don't agree with this (unless you stretch semantics far enough to include strategy modification as part of implementation).

In practice, the measure of a successful implementation is that the chosen changes in strategy or other matters have been made successfully, without creating significant new problems. For a class, since we don't have an organization in which to implement changes, your output will be an implementation plan. This can be a rather simple plan that identifies the major steps needed to make the decision or change in strategy take effect, without creating new problems. As you identify the steps, you should try to anticipate major potential barriers to effecting the change, and include steps to deal with the barriers. The following sections also can help you in identifying action steps.

WHAT IS AN IMPLEMENTATION PLAN?

* For our purposes, it is a sequence of major action steps necessary to make a decision (e.g., a change in strategy) take effect, that answers the following basic questions while considering major barriers to implementation:

• What (needs to be done)?
• How?
• Who?
• When?
• Where?
• Why? (i.e., provide some brief logic for why this approach and these steps are needed)

MAJOR CONSIDERATIONS AS WE IDENTIFY THE KEY ACTION STEPS

• Resources (financial, human, physical, technological) - what is necessary to get those we need and don't have?
• Support - how to obtain and maintain sufficient support to allow successful implementation, by considering key "stakeholders" and what matters to them. [See module on stakeholder analysis for more detail.]
• Reward systems - don't be surprised when you "get what you reward". When you want different behaviors, changing the reward system is often a key point of leverage, and an important part of implementation.
• Timing - especially sequencing of action steps and constraints on when things have to happen
• How to monitor and control the implementation to produce the desired results (how will we know how successful we are?)
• Organization structure - this often is given too much attention, but sometimes needs changes
• Leadership - do we have what is needed?
  (For reports in this class, the first four items above are most important; the last three, although important in practice, get into more detail than required for the class.)

MISC. POINTS

• The individuals who need to implement a decision often are different from those who make it - which almost always causes problems in implementation (remember the NIH = "not invented here" syndrome)
• Regarding organization structure
:
• Structure should follow strategy. Reorganizing always has significant initial costs (in productive time as people learn and work out new roles and relationships, plus complain and talk about the changes). There are costs in employee anxiety and morale, and often in loss of some good people. Therefore, unless there is (a) a good reason to believe that a reorganization is necessary and will pay off in the long run, plus (b) clarity about what the change in structure is supposed to accomplish, it is a dumb thing to reorganize.
• There is no one best way to design an organization (functional, divisional, matrix are the three main structures, with mixtures and variations)
• One of the major reasons that even highly successful companies go into decline is staying too long with a successful strategy, mission, technology, products, configuration, and/or culture
• Leadership and staffing requirements change, especially as the company develops
• Organizational culture needs to be considered:
• Is the planned change or strategy compatible with the company's current culture?
• If not compatible, is management willing and able to make major organizational changes and live with the lengthy time and significant costs required to implement a major change that is contrary to the current organizational culture?
• Unless management is willing to make the major organizational changes plus time and resource commitment required to change or manage around the present culture, the implementation is highly unlikely to be successful
• In measuring performance, multiple measures are needed; e.g., return on investment has limitations - consider such measures as value added & improvements in competitive advantage
• Measuring performance can cause major problems:
• Lack of valid, measurable (not just "quantifiable") objectives or standards
• Inability of information systems to provide timely, valid information
• Even if these two are OK, the measurements can cause negative side effects:
  * Short-term orientation
  * Goal displacement: suboptimization & behavior substitution (quantifiable or measured items dominate what really matters)