Management Operating Systems
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Companies generally fail at implementing a strategy or managing operations because they lack an overarching management system to integrate and align these two vital processes” *
A Management Operating System is designed to uniquely address this deficiency. It deploys formal, information-based routines that your managers and supervisors can use to align organisational activities to your company’s strategic, tactical and operational objectives.
These information routines set output and behavioural standards and use mechanisms, such as ‘Plan Do Check Act’ to ensure that these output standards are achieved. They are also diagnostic – variance management requires assessment of how well performance is achieving objectives and analysis of where problems exist. Corrective action then flows from this diagnosis and is aimed at revising behaviour, goals, or both in order to reduce the performance gap.
The Management Operating System provides the management framework for your processes and collates information in a form that facilitates informed decision making. Without accurate and timely information your decision makers at all levels of the business cannot make swift effective decisions. Your employees too may not be recognised for the contribution that they make to your organisation and this may affect their motivation.
It is designed to deliver:
- Annual strategic plans with quarterly strategic review
- Quarterly rolling plans, which have an 18 month horizon.
- An annual budget that is driven by the 18 month rolling plan
- A resource and project plan
- Non-financial metrics that measure the people, process and system initiatives of your strategic and tactical plans.
- Integrated targets, broken down to an operational level
- Logical variance management and corrective action
- Integrated reports that measure each of these targets in a coherent way
The systems will not manage the business. It is up to all levels of management to ensure that the systems are used to produce the performance indicators that allow rational decision making to improve the overall performance of the business.
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* Kaplan & Norton, The Execution Premium 2008 HBS Publishing Corporation
