While I was an impartial viewer for the Super Bowl, frankly an excuse to yell at the television and devour copious amounts of savory snacks, I couldn’t help but notice the coaching staff with their playbooks in hand. I thought to myself, while each team has one, what is in there to ensure that they are on a winning trajectory.
How does the playbook integrate with the delivery of services? Much like in sport there should be an offensive and defensive strategy applied to how we achieve our goals.
Offence
A plan for what we are trying to achieve for each financial quarter should be known as well as understood by all those in the department who are providing service, whether that is IT, HR or Finance. In the football game scenario when you are watching on TV you are barraged with statistical information at every turn. I would suspect that each of the teams have compiled to allow them to not only make the best decisions to allow them to win (meet business objectives) but to do so in an way which allows them to build on each point they score.
Your service delivery teams also should be reviewing the reporting that is available to them to continue to build off their successes but to also adjust when something that was not planned for comes their way.
Defense
Despite our best efforts there are going to be times where we are not able to make improvements or “move the needle” in a direction which we want to go in. This is where we need to ensure that in addition to having a good offensive strategy that we have also planned for areas where challenges present themselves.
Having regular checkpoints throughout the year will ensure that we identify any potential challenges to providing service. In some cases this might be soliciting feedback from your business partners to ensure that we are continuing to deliver services which are reflective of the business outcomes.
Remember that while we may have an end goal for the year in terms of service delivery as it pertains to business objectives, our business may also have had some adjustments to make as well and we need to validate that we are all still on the same page.
Overall we need to make sure that no matter how good the strategy is that is it communicated and understood by all the players on the team. This might avoid some mistakes at a crucial time when you should run the ball rather than passing…..