Modeling Strategic Focus Areas

Determine who needs to be involved and the scope of this exercise

• Who is your executive sponsor and champion?

• Get buy-in from your executive sponsor on the stakeholder interviews and documentation requirements, so they can help drive commitment across the org.

• What is the scope of your strategy planning or refresh? Is this 1 year? 3 years? 5 years? Does this include the entire organization or only certain business units?

Conduct stakeholder interviews

These stakeholder interviews are led by the directly responsible individual (DRI) with the executive sponsor, and the goals are to learn and/or confirm:

• Do we have high-level company strategies and goals?

• How do we decide what to invest in and why?

• What things do we do fund? Are they strategies, goals, work, or something else?

• How do we track our strategic priorities? Where does this data live?

• How do we communicate and disseminate this today?

• How do we measure success towards achieving our priorities today?

• What do our executives and business leaders care about from a reporting perspective? What’s missing today?

Gather documentation

You’ll need to identify and work with stakeholders across the organization to find your organization’s strategies. This information is usually scattered across different products or files, such as slides, spreadsheets, or PDFs. Before bringing those to the workshop, confirm that the data is up-to-date.

To find this information, you may need to ask:

• What are our strategies across the organization?

• Do we have strategies at every layer of our organization, such as departments or business units?

• How do our strategies connect, or not connect, to each other?

• Do some groups share the same strategy?

• Who owns each strategy?

Paste links to any URLs or files you collect onto the whiteboard so that they are easy for the group to access.

Determine the size of the group and who will be involved

Before running the play, you’ll need to make a few decisions:

• Will you run this play with one large group or would it be more effective to break this up into smaller groups based on departments or business units?

• Who are the stakeholders with the knowledge to model your strategies?

• Who is the directly responsible individual (DRI)?

Identify a specific branch of strategy to model

• Whether you decided to bring together one large group or are running this play with specific departments or business units, identify one branch of your strategic areas to build out.

• Having one area to drill down into can ground the group in something achievable without getting overwhelmed.

If your organization’s strategies and goals have already been documented somewhere, the workshop should include a representative group of people contributing to that process.

Draft your attendee list and think about who might play the following roles:

• Facilitator

• Executive sponsor

• Business leader

• Operations leader

Don’t be surprised if some people play multiple roles.

Create a meeting time and invite participants to attend. Include the whiteboard template in the invite and ask attendees to review it so that they can ask clarifying questions ahead of time.

Review the agenda and set expectations

Start by making sure everyone has access to a whiteboard. We recommend using a Confluence whiteboard. We have a template titled “Focus area diagram”.

Remind the group that you’ll be modeling your organization’s strategic focus areas in this workshop. This exercise will help your organization:

• Drive visibility into the strategic priorities your organization is investing in and help track progress against strategy, not just delivery.

• Increase transparency about your organization’s strategies and help drive alignment across areas of your business.

• Communicate and visualize strategy to everyone in the organization.

• Empower better, faster strategic decisions.

Review the examples in the whiteboard to help with conceptual understanding.

Organizations often struggle to draw clear lines between strategy, goals, and work. Aligning on your definitions of these concepts is really important before you start mapping how these concepts connect to one another.

Talk your team through the intention of this step and set a timer. After the time is up, discuss the outcome.

The ways you describe the kinds of strategies you have at different levels of your business often map to the way you describe your organizational hierarchy, such as Company strategy, Business unit strategy, etc.

Review the documentation gathered during the Prep section to decide if that’s how you’ll continue to describe the kinds of strategies you use moving forward.

Give those kinds of strategies labels. It’s probably realistic to describe the top two kinds of strategies. You can definitely go deeper, but the strategic areas get trickier to describe and name the closer you get to individual projects.

It may be helpful to identify those top-level strategies as a group and then break into smaller groups to drill down into the next level of strategies that support a specific higher-level strategy.

Resist the urge to self-edit or overthink it at this stage. Consider this a living document that will be refined over time.

Build out one branch of your company’s specific strategies from top to bottom

It may be hard enough to align on what your company defines as a strategy at the top two levels, but if you’ve already been thinking about this and you have the right stakeholders in the room, you might be ready to go deeper.

Pick one of your top-level strategies and break it down into the sub-types that support it. If you get to the point where the path is no longer clear, that’s probably the right place to stop.

Unleash the potential of your strategy with Atlassian Focus

With Atlassian Focus, it’s now easier to:

• Define, manage, and iterate on your enterprise strategy by creating strategic areas of focus.

• Connect your enterprise strategic priorities to goals, work, positions, and funds.

• Ensure visibility and transparency in your strategic priorities across your organization.