By Craig London, Guest Contributor

I am a technology project manager for a major financial-services company (MajFin). I’d like to share how I took the concept of “strategy as problem solving” and applied it to my own organization’s strategic problems.

As I endeavored to take a strategic perspective, I found my question keying on this challenge: how do we create a strategy that both identifies the critical problems to be solved and creates a strategic journey to solving them? I came to see this in the following terms:

Critical Problems to be Solved

In MajFin, we have a large group that we call the Operate Team. It is dedicated to supporting the production environment, the large and complex computer systems that run the day-to-day business. The Operate team tends to be dissatisfied with the work they deliver. Too, many people perceived that customer satisfaction was also low.

I thought about how to define the situation. There were many symptoms and three of them seemed very important. They were (in priority order):

• Unappreciated. The Operate Team members often worked very long, and sometimes irregular, hours in resolving critical system issues. Team members often feel that their contribution isn’t valued.
• Reactive. Much, if not most, of the work performed by the Operate Team is in reaction to some problem or event. While everyone is glad to see the problem fixed, there is often discussion as to why the group can’t anticipate more problems.
• Opaque. Due to the nature of that work, the amount of work performed by the Operate Team can be very difficult to measure. The Operate Team’s work is largely unseen by most in the broader organization.

These symptoms were important to us and worthy of problem solving effort. I felt they are not just the result of some inaccurate perception or lack of understanding about the work being performed by the Operate team. Perceptions could be changed through better communications between the Operate Team and the broader organization; key problems needed solutions and this meant that there needed to be a strategy.

Defining the Strategy Pillars and the Strategy Implementation

The critical problems led directly to defining the strategy pillars:

Based on the problems identified, the translation from “problems” to “strategies” became clear. Unappreciated is transformed into value added, reactive to proactive, opaque to transparent. I had been told that strategy was a specialized kind of problem solving. This personal realization made it relevant.

As I looked at how I had initially ordered the problem, I saw I was focusing on the most salient part of the story (the customer did not appreciate the efforts of the Operate Team). What I had done was focus on the most painful symptom, the Operate Team was unappreciated. Naturally, I saw the highest strategic priority being “value added.” But, as I looked deeper, I saw that there was a “strategy story” that with the flow of elements as shown in this graphic.

I began to grasp the issue: our opaqueness (the work being performed is both unseen and poorly understood) was creating a reactive organizational response and behavior. This, in turn, creates the overall feeling of being unappreciated. This was my first cut. I needed to think about things not in terms of their emotional impact on me and the Operate Team, but rather in terms of X causes Y.

Once I drew the graphics, the approach seemed obvious. Keep in mind that my situation at MajFin is like many other complex operating environments: there are many moving parts and everyone is busy focusing on all those moving parts. It is hard to find a good perspective, and hard to focus.

The key lesson: Understand the linkages between visible symptoms and root causes. While I want to move to “value added” as quickly as possible, it became clear that I need to focus on the leading indicators. My most important strategic objective, Value Added, cannot be achieved without obtaining the benefits from the other two predecessor goals.

As we charter this as an initiative, it has become clear that we need to identify basic incremental metrics starting with the Transparency Pillar. We will deliver those benefits incrementally. As we demonstrate progress, we expect more support that will lead to the Operate Team’s “value add.”

Do you work in a complex environment? How do you gain a strategic perspective?