Pratical value for Money: Strategy Objective

The transaction or Programme Logic is fundamental to understanding and evaluating value for money. This is usually made up of strategic objective, input (staff, consultants, raw materials and capital, all ingredients of output), activity or process, output or Result and the related impact. Every transaction, project or programme, must as a necessity have these elements. The extent to which these components are identified and understood and how their inputs and activities/processes are prudently applied and implemented, go a long way to stimulate value for money results.

Our discussion here today will centre on Strategic Objective, the first element of Transaction or Programme logic. An off shoot of two key important elements -Vision and Mission, a rarely acknowledged and discussed issue, strategic objective lays down the desired quantitative and qualitative outcome of a transaction or programme, demanding that the desired outcome of a transaction, expenditure, project or programme is properly defined.

This is, however, usually not the case as in most cases we do not precisely define what we want out of a transaction to make determining whether or not the objective would be possibly met.

In our everyday activities as individuals, companies or even nation states, we get the full understanding of strategic objective twisted because we do not clearly situate the foundational importance of Vision and Mission when formulating our strategic objectives and end up building without a foundation.

It’s important here, therefore, to ask what Strategy is and thoroughly understand it, beginning with a look at the dictionary meaning.

The Oxford dictionary defines Strategy as a plan of action designed to achieve a long-term or overall aim while Wikipedia defines it as a high level plan to achieve one or more goals under conditions of uncertainty.

The above two definitions simply see Strategy as “a Plan,” the same way many us also see it. But the Businessdictionary.com disagrees with those definitions, exposing the incompleteness in merely describing strategy as a plan and defining it as “a method or plan chosen to bring about a desired future, such as achievement of a goal or solution to a problem”

Two words in that definition give the indication of a foundation that must exist upon which strategy as a plan should be built. They are “Desired future”, which is Vision and “A Goal or solution,” which is the Mission. Any Strategy not built on a well-articulated and clearly defined “Vision” and “Mission” will either fail or operate sub optimally and will not deliver value for money.

Warren Bennis and Burt Nanus, authors of Leaders: The Strategies for Taking Charge in their theory of leadership, stated that “to choose a direction, a leader must first have developed a mental image of a possible and desirable future state of the organisation.”

This image, which they called a vision, may be as vague as a dream or as precise as a goal or mission statement.

“The critical point is that a vision articulates a view of a realistic, credible, attractive future for the organisation, a condition that is better in some important ways than what now exists”.

The relationship between “future state” and “Strategy” embedded in the vision can be seen clearly as an element of strategy, which is a plan to attain a defined future state.

A vision is a leader’s positive mental state of the ultimate targeted outcome, output, result or future state. The leader charts a course of action to get there, identifies the resources required, the challenges that are likely to be faced, how to address the challenges, how to measure progress to know if they are gradually getting there and how they will know when they eventually arrive at the future state, among others.

Vision is valuable because goals are valuable. A leader becomes like the front man on top of a tree, he sees the future state as a strategic focus and beckons on his followers to come along.

A leader, be it of a country, company, union or team, without a vision of a positive future state to take his followers cannot clearly build a credible strategic objective and is doomed to fail.

There are generally two concerns with vision as a concept. First, a vision begins to lose its power when it is achieved, becoming no driving force for action anymore and the organisation may begin to lose direction, if a new vision is not evolved;

Secondly, if a vision is so ambitious that it’s not achieved in five or ten years, it ceases to motivate and stimulate and becomes unrealistic.

Strategy is everything required to strike the best results, be clear on the role of Vision in strategy and you will be on the path “To do more with less by Doing Things Right and Doing the Right Things”.

Certainly, you will, if you apply the value for money principles.

Watch out for the next article.