Getting Started
“We’ll do some planning next quarter…when things settle down a bit.”
Having worked with many small to mid-sized organizations, we understand that managers have no spare time or bandwidth to devote to a strategy and goals-management process. Often the management team has every intention of focusing on these issues, but the effort keeps getting pushed back—because no one has the time. We have also seen the enormous positive impact that a little bit of process can have. Ironically, the right process can free up managers’ time by shifting some activities from reactive to proactive.
The keys are to keep it simple…and to simply get started
ValueGroove is designed to get you started quickly with a simple, but high-impact process. Critically, it is designed so that your team does not have to devote significant time or bandwidth to launch the process. We provide easy to use tools, and we provide the initial legwork and support to get you started.
You don’t need a perfect strategy or perfect goals to benefit greatly from ValueGroove. Just set some basic goals and milestones, and start meeting monthly to review progress and lessons learned. The team can then make adjustments as needed, turning strategy into a process of continuous adaptation.
To learn more about getting started with ValueGroove, please contact us.
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The essential elements of the ValueGroove process:
- Strategy and roadmap
- A few high-level company goals (Roadmap goals)
- Simple plan for each goal, with monthly milestones
- Monthly meeting of the management team to review progress versus milestones
The typical steps for getting started with the process are:
Step 1: each person on the management team fills out the initial ValueGroove Strategy questionnaire.
Step 2: Paul O’Malley meets with the management team and, starting with the information gathered in the questionnaires, helps them clarify and document the organization’s strategy and roadmap. The team also establishes a small number of annual goals for the current year, based on the strategy and roadmap.
Step 3: each member of the management team takes ownership of one or more of the annual goals, and creates a simple plan for each goal, including monthly milestones.
Step 4: the team meets monthly to review progress on milestones to date, and to identify lessons learned, make adjustments, etc.
Later optional enhancements to the process include:
- Adding more goals for individual management team members, if they have started out with only one or two roadmap goals each
- Adding a development goal plan for each manager that is reviewed monthly with each person’s manager
- Bringing more managers into the goals process
- Introducing the weekly planning capabilities in VMPgoals, especially if people are having difficulty reaching their monthly milestones
