Foreword: Several years ago while in a leadership role over an operationalized telecommunication cell, I was challenged with a variety of knowledge levels within the staff as well as high staff turn over. I needed a method to bring the staff up to speed and continually increase knowledge. After looking around, I drew upon operations management practices and my own educational experiences looking to McGraw-Hill's SRA program. SRA is the acronym for Science Research Associates, Inc but also has become known as Short Read Archive. The concept was short read lessons that drive a point home and were not too time-consuming. In short, learning on the fly. The SRA cards had the assignment on the front and a quiz on the back. This is one SRA lesson without the quiz.
Short Read Archive: Putting Strategy to Task
Discussion
Paradigms of thought are important to various disciplines; engineers, mathematicians, songwriters, politicians, etc… who have unique paradigms or frames of mind they operate within. Project management is no different. This lesson discusses how to think in terms of putting strategy to task or taking a broad vision and putting that to task.
Terms
Strategy: A long term statement that involves an end state and frames at a high level the approach to the achievement of that end state.
Objectives: A smaller elemental goal of a strategy that is focused on a specific accomplishment. Usually, multiple objectives are necessary to achieve a strategy.
Constraint: An externally-imposed limitation or control that is generally fixed and cannot be changed without approval from the external entity.
Restraint: A self-imposed limitation or control that is changeable by an internal or local authority.
Lesson
Putting strategy to task is a challenge. Any strategy is not easily handled for most professionals who are operators who are task and process-oriented with a can-do attitude. Relating strategy to the task is the process of scoping a project and one methodology for this process is effects-based operations. In short, the path to task is:
Doing something in support of an objective causes an effect that is then measured in some way to ensure that it meets an established quality standard. In order to ensure that all actions contribute to the scope, everyone on the project needs to know the strategy as that defines the scope. Strategy is the ‘why’ a project is undertaken. In mobilizing people to task, the ‘why’ is a greater motivator than the ‘what’. The ‘why’ creates a unity of effort and focus for a team.
Supplemental Video: How Great Leaders Inspire Action
The objectives and desirable effects become constraints and restraints for the project. However, constraints and restraints can be other limitations such as legal, financial, privacy, etc… Overall, putting strategy to task involves a deliberate focus.