Mastering the Management System Article Review

Mastering the Management System article review

Jiaqi Wang

11225720

This article can be summarized in three parts. First, management systems are often to blame for failures. Secondly, using closed-loop development of strategy is key. Last, there are five step plan introduced by Kaplan and Norton provides a strategy for building a comprehensive management system. And our client is Priddy Learning Academy.

The authors introduce the management system, which can help our client in developing and executing a strategy properly.

1. Develop a strategy. Assess business assumptions and competitive environment. Before formulating a strategy statement, a company should be aware of its purpose, future plan and value. Our client Priddy is willing to offer students better education, and because they said they don't want to expand, we need to help them to figure out a specific future plan. And we’ll do a survey on their competitors and similar companies. Formulate a strategy on the basis of the company's strengths.
2. Translate the strategy. Translate it into objectives and measures that can be communicated to the employees. We’ll help Priddy make the strategy easier to understand and help Priddy to use the strategy map to explain it.
3. Plan operations. This is the most complex point. First, setting priorities for process improvement. Align process improvements with strategic priorities. Furthermore, a sales plan is required. In addition, managers need to collect data productivity from process improvements and sales plans, in order to create a resource capacity plan. As last step, they need to calculate the financial implications of their resource capacity plan. So in order to help Priddy. We need to create a time schedule to see which change should be done first. And we should find the capacities Priddy have that can execute the strategic goals. Also, we’ll analysis Priddy’s financial situation in order to clarify the final strategy plan.
4. Monitor and learn. Review performance of operating departments and business functions. Problem solving is an important part of this step. This part can make sure that the whole plan will work. So we need to do following work to help Priddy to monitoring the strategy and if there are problems, we need to solve them.
5. Test and adapt the strategy. Adapt the strategy becomes necessary sometimes if some assumptions are flawed. Create cost and profitability reports. This can be related with the fourth step.

In addition, these five steps help managers in balancing short-term operational goals with long-term strategic ones. The article deals with successful strategy execution. It has two basic rules. Understand the management cycle that links strategy and operations, and know what tools to apply at each stage of the cycle. This article can really give us some useful advice when helping our clients. We should use the five steps to help our client make the strategy, and help the implantation of the strategy.