Making Strategy Real: Key Principles of an Effective Implementation Roadmap Blue Garnet Briefing, August 2014  

This briefing is part one of an occasional series that will synthesize the “Blue Garnet way,” pulling together our best thinking on strategy and management in the social sector. Our aim is to provide actionable insights and ignite meaningful conversations.

Your organization’s mission is too important to spend precious time and resources on an aspirational, pie-in-the-sky strategic plan destined only to sit on a shelf. If you are going to invest the time to create a strategic plan, then make it real by developing an effective Implementation Roadmap.

What is an Implementation Roadmap? It is a way to make your strategic plan actionable, creating a means of tracking progress towards achieving goals and ultimately “moving your needle.” Your Implementation Roadmap serves as a multi-year and organization-wide way to review your results and, most importantly, to learn.

What key principles will make your Implementation Roadmap effective?

1. Prioritize large tasks. These are the major workstreams necessary to operationalize your plan, more than just a laundry list of things that matter to your organization.

2. Resource it right. Determine the resources you will need in order to accomplish each workstream, and assign a lead and backup who will be “on-the-hook” to make sure their assigned activities are completed. Be honest about the amount of time each task will require from your team, and about how much each task will cost.

3. Pace and calibrate. Create a realistic timeline, planning the amount of time required to engage in and complete each task, and noting interdependent, preparatory, and follow-on activities. Your timeline should also include milestones and targets against which to track your progress.

4. Plan for bumps in the road. You will need a plan for how your team will use, update, and adjust the Implementation Roadmap over time. This principle will make your Implementation Roadmap into a living tool that your whole team can use.

5. Step back for a “sanity check.” Ask yourself: Is this feasible? What else is going on in the organization that will impact these activities or affect our capacity?

By integrating these five key principles into your Implementation Roadmap, it will become an actionable, robust, and effective tool to operationalize your strategic plan. Committing to the discipline of strategic thinking when you have conflicting priorities is a challenge, but with the Implementation Roadmap you can adapt even when you hit the inevitable bumps in the road. And remember: if you need help, let us know!

Are you ready to invest the time to operationalize your strategy?

Here is what our clients are saying about implementation roadmapping… …it allowed this “amorphous thing

[strategic planning] to coalesce into something we could achieve”

…Blue Garnet developed “a great tool for addressing a real organizational need”

…this discipline ”translates to and helps other areas of my work”

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