Modeling Strategic Focus Areas
As your leadership team enters a strategy refresh or planning cycle, run this Play to build and align on your organization’s strategic focus areas.
PREP TIME
1 - 2 weeks
Run TIME
90 - 180 mins
Persons
4 - 10
5-second summary
- Define and align executive leadership on organizational priorities.
- Identify gaps in strategy.
- Increase transparency across executive teams.
WHAT YOU WILL NEED
- Video conferencing with screen sharing or meeting space.
- Whiteboard (see template).
- Optional: markers, sticky notes, and timer.
PLAY resources
How to model your organization’s focus areas
Align your organization’s strategic focus areas, which help leaders define and visualize goals, work, positions, and funds.
What is a focus area?
Focus areas are areas of a company’s business that represent its strategic priorities and investments.
Why run a Modeling Strategic Focus Area Play?
Focus areas help leaders define, manage, measure, and visualize their strategic focus areas. With focus areas, leaders can connect goals, work, positions, and funds to strategies. Research shows that organizations need to pair strategies and align them with practices, leadership behavior, and management processes to be competitive.
When should you create a focus area?
Organizations should define focus areas when entering a strategy refresh or annual, quarterly, or monthly planning cycle.
4 benefits of modeling focus areas
- Visibility: A simple framework to define, manage, and visualize strategic priorities aligned to goals, work, positions and funds.
- Transparency: The organization knows what the company is prioritizing at the right magnitude and altitude.
- Communication: All teams understand the “why” behind their work so everyone can operate from the same context. Research shows that by fostering strong communication/collaboration, middle managers are better equipped to convey valuable insights from the operational level to the top management team. It also helps ensure that strategic directives are clearly understood and effectively executed throughout the organization.
- Decision-making: Leaders get the context needed to make faster strategic decisions, and learn from and validate the impact of decisions made – so they know where to invest next. The bidirectional flow of information across leaders enables more informed and contextually relevant strategies, increasing organizational adaptability, and improving overall performance.
1. Prep the Play
Est. time: 1 week
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.
Pro Tip:
To help set context during the interviews, use the demo from the whiteboard to help stakeholders understand how the answers to these questions will manifest.
2. Scope the workshop
Est. time: 3-5 days
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.
3. Identify stakeholders, align on roles & responsibilities, and schedule the workshop
Est. time: 1 day
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.
4. Kickoff the Play
Est. time: 15 min
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.
5. Begin the concept mapping exercise
Est. time: 15 min
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.
6. Identify all levels of strategy; focus the workshop on the top two levels of strategies
Est. time: 30 min
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.
7. Name the specific strategies your company has at the top two levels
Est. time: 30 min
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.
Follow-up
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.
Still have questions?
Start a conversation with other Atlassian Team Playbook users, get support, or provide feedback.
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