Strategy Implementation - Essay Example

? STRATEGY IMPLEMENTATION …………………. College/ ………….. …………. Introduction   Business or corporate strategy is perhapsone of the most widely used buzzwords in today’s business literatures. Strategy is a specific pattern of decisions in an organization, that defines and determines the objectives of the firm, by providing certain structures on how to achieve these goals (Mintzberg, Lampel and Quinn, 2003, p. 72). Strategy of an organization necessarily incorporates planning, processes, patterns, procedures, people and perspective. This piece of research paper attempts to draft a report about the recommendation for the strategic direction for British Airways. This paper compares and contrasts the roles for strategy implementation, identifies the resources required for its implementation and assesses what measures and timescales can be used to achieve this strategy implementation for British Airways. Strategy Direction Defining and determining strategic direction involve specifying the images, structures and characters that the firm thinks to develop over time. As Hitt, Ireland and Hoskisson (2008, p. 350) pointed, strategic direction is normally framed within the contexts of the conditions like opportunities and threats that strategic leaders expect their organization to face in its near future. Daft (2009, p. 58) has also put forward almost similar view that strategy direction is a process that typically begins with the assessment of opportunities and threats in the external environment, including change, uncertainty, resources available etc. Matha, Boehm and Silverman (2008, p. 47) found that strategy direction is based on how employees hear about the strategy and how they do involve in it. A firm with long-term strategic direction probably will have to consider two basic elements, they are core ideology and an envisioned future. The first one is to motivate its people through the organizational culture and company’s heritage, and the second one encourages them to draw out of their expectations of accomplishments (Hitt, Ireland and Hoskisson 2008, p. 350). As depicted in the figure above, managing a firm’s resource portfolio, maintaining organizational culture and emphasizing ethical practices are highly critical factors affecting determining of the strategic direction. Roles and Responsibilities of strategy implementation Strategy implementation is connected with creating a portfolio of the strategic programs and secondly it involves attracting, allocating and managing all the necessary resources to deliver these strategic programs. Strategy implementation represents a specific pattern of decisions and actions that are intended to carry out a particular plan in an organization. When it comes to the case of British Airways, the company is widely known for effective corporate strategies like technology and business innovation, customer-enabled business strategy or customer focus (Egger and Buhalis, 2008, p. 272), supreme customer services, service orientation etc. At British Airways, once the strategy has been determined, the management team responsible for the strategy implementation must translate the strategy program in to appropriate tactical plans, processes, programs and budgets. Operating plans and programs for each function are to be developed in this stage. In implementing the strategy of customer focus or innovation, the management of the British Airways prepares a plan including timetables, milestones and details of the organization’s risk management as well (Atkin and Brooks, 2009, p. 22). As compared to this, the strategy implementation in Virgin Atlantic is mainly influenced by the strategic vision of its top management and quality and entrepreneurial drive of the management teams (Aaker and Joachimsthaler, 2000, p. 34). The strategy implementation in Virgin Atlantic is thus closely linked to the top management’s vision and it takes those steps that the management instructs. A strategy is planned and developed mainly with a motive to achieve competitive advantages. Similarly, when British Airways considers customer relationship strategy (CRM) or brand loyalty or supreme customer service strategy, the main factor triggering this change and strategy will be to achieve competitive advantages to its main competitor like Virgin Atlantic, and other Airways. In formulating and implementing a strategy like those mentioned above, British Airways requires to take effective steps a) to develop the mission and vision of the strategy, b) to communicate them to the customers through consistent messages, c) to identify the teams to be involved in the strategy development, d) to assign their roles and responsibilities, e) to prepare the targets, budgets and design the benchmarks etc. Resources Required to the strategy implementation A strategy implementation, let it be Customer Relationship Strategy or Innovation or customer orientation etc, necessarily requires resources. As depicted in the diagram given above, effectively managing the resource-portfolio is significant key to the success of the strategy. Plan, process, people, procedures, money and time are some of the very significant resources required for the implementation of the strategy. As Enz (2009, p. 19) stressed, strategy implementation requires managing stakeholder relationships and coordinating and managing organizational resources including people, process, time, materials etc. British Airways is sufficiently equipped for implementing its strategy, customer relationship. In order to implement the customer relationship strategy, British Airways has been sufficiently equipped because it has initially calculated the budget for it, assessed the money required, fixed a time schedule and recruited talented, skilled, knowledgeable and experienced people including air-hostess and other service providers in order them to deliver desired quality services to the customers. People in an organization are perhaps the most valuable, powerful and highly rewarding assets and therefore they are the most demanded resources for any strategy in a firm. Technology, time, place, people and processes are the other necessary resources required for the strategy implementation and effectively managing these resources is extremely important for its success. Monitoring the strategy implementation Once the strategy has been planned, resources are allocated and the strategy has been implemented, it is very important that the management team responsible for the strategy implementation at British Airways should monitor the strategy being implemented, by assessing and measuring the timescales, achievements and outcomes. What ever the strategy being implemented, the results of the strategy after a specific time period are to be evaluated. The main targets of the customer relationship strategy implemented by the British Airways were to attract more than 20,000 new customers, retain the existing customers who are more than 2 million, and collect feedback from them so as to evaluate how closer are the customers with the company. Benchmarking is one of the useful methods to evaluate and monitor the results of a strategy because it is a rigorous process that links competitive analysis to the company’s strategy implementation and development. British Airways can use benchmarking to measure the performance of its strategy in comparison to the similar or other strategies of Virgin Atlantic and thus to identify how the strategy performed in achieving a specific or common organizational goal. Benchmarking thus can be used to assess whether the company has been able to attract more than 20,000 new customers, retain the existing customers and collect feedback from them with positive opinions about the services of the company. The proposed targets like attracting new 20,000 customers, retaining the existing 2 million etc are achievable because, the company has planned huge investments in training the staffs to provide extremely useful and superior quality services to them, and this will be measurable within the first six months itself. While implementing the strategy, the strategic management team must have set specific targets, standards and possible outcomes so that company can later check and analyze the outcomes of the strategy in relation to how far the company has been successful in strategy implementation and how far the strategy is successful. Strategy implementation is a continuous process and therefore after the initial stage, say 3-6 months, the strategic team at British Airways should see the changes being embedded in the organization. They also should see the tangible results coming from the behavioural changes that the company motivated. There can be both operational, individual and organizational targets while implementing the strategy. In order to see how the strategy has affected the organization at large, operation of the firm and individuals personally, the tem should evaluate the organizational and operational performance and behavioural as well as attitudinal changes to its people. Conclusion A large number of firms in today’s fierce competitive environment put maximum efforts to find effective strategies, implement them effectively and manage them for organizational success. An effective strategy implementation should manage the resources effectively, consider organizational culture and evaluate the results over time. This paper has highlighted the importance of strategy implementation and analyzed its basic elements like role and responsibilities of strategy implementation, managing resources, monitoring the results in relation to the strategy implementation at British Airways References Aaker, DA & Joachimsthaler, E 2000, Brand leadership, Illustrated edition, Simon and Schuster Atkin, B & Brooks, A 2009, Total Facilities Management, Third illustrated edition, John Wiley and Sons Egger, R & Buhalis, D 2008, eTourism case studies: management and marketing issues, Illustrated edition, Butterworth-Heinemann Enz, CA 2009, Hospitality Strategic Management: Concepts and Cases, Illustrated second edition, John Wiley and Sons Daft, RL 2009, Organization Theory and Design, Tenth edition, Cengage Learning Matha, B, Boehm, M & Silverman, M 2008, Beyond the babble: leadership communication that drives results, Illustrated edition, John Wiley and Sons Mintzberg, H, Lampel, J & Quinn, JB 2003, The Strategy Process: Concepts, Contexts, Cases, Global Fourth Edition, Prentice Hall, Pearson Education, Inc Hitt, MA, Ireland, RD & Hoskisson, RE 2009, Strategic management: competitiveness and globalization : concepts & cases, Illustrated eighth edition, Cengage Learning Read More