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Steven Bleistein, Japan
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Managing Cross-Divisional Collaboration and Strategy Maps
Often, achievement of a Critical Success Factor requires collaboration of two or more divisions across organizational boundaries. For example, to increase sales of new products in overseas markets, collaboration between international sales, R&D, and marketing might be required.
However, these divisions tend to be managed separately, and might also have separate divisional strategy maps.
While strategy maps can help in working out a collaborative relationship between vertical organizational entities, strategy maps and BSC seem to offer little for managing horizontal collaboration relationships, responsibilities and accountabilities compared to managing vertical commitments.
I would be interested in community member experiences, and what have you done to address this issue?
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Rick McPherson
Teacher, United States
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Cross Functional Collaboration - Alignment Maps I have used an "Alignment Chart" (or map) to show on the right the top goals/objectives of the business, then had each department identify what their objectives are that align with those goals, then had groups within the departments identify their goals to match, then driven it all the way down to individual objectives and asked hard for everyone to align around the corporate goals, and only add other goals that do not align to add them sparingly - keeping the organization focused on its goals... So that an HR recruiter, for example, can see how their recruiting can help us increase revenues, decrease costs, etc by effective recruiting for our needs.
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Arthi Sairaman
Project Manager, United States
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Managing Cross-divisional Collaboration Alignment of commitments and goals at the senior divisional leadership level is going to be critical. Make sure that they carry the same commitment and measurable metrics as it pertains to this effort (alignment of incentives/ rewards). They need to emphasize the collaboration and stay consistent in the messaging. Assemble the senior cross-divisional team and invest in understanding the individual's strengths and what success looks like for them. Identify your influencers and make sure they are truly committed to the effort (they will help you overcome resistance).
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Elizabeth Coleman
Innovation Consultant, New Zealand
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Collaboration of Two or More Divisions Across Organizational Boundaries You can also establish a cross-functional board at level three in the organization, reporting to the level 2 managers. Monthly reviews of new product or service opportunities (generated through a funnel capturing ideas that are evaluated before submitting to the board). Use company strategic objectives as criteria for evaluation of the opportunities. Use a Delphi voting technique to maintain objectivity before final discussion / review of the opportunities. Cross divisional relationships and mutual interests will be formed based on need/desire to initiate new developments jointly. Communication channels will be opened and competing interests identified / shared. Organizational goals and objectives will be supported by measurable strategic initiatives. Agree with both previous posts, use of alignment chart and commitment / goal alignment.
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Eric Buining
Consultant, Netherlands
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Cross-divisional Collaboration Horizontal and vertical collaboration can indeed be establised by using alignment maps. However, the common goals and objectives of lower level entities and peer entities should be based on an in-dept analysis of the real cause-effect relationships between the various organizational entities. Without real cause-effect relationships we can not ever find proper alignment maps nor being able to implement cross-divisional collaboration.
In order to achieve the necessary cross-divisional collaboration the performance measurements should be based on these cause-effect relationships as well.
If we do not change those than each entity will only work for its own good.
One of the best methods known is the constraint management model using the current reality tree, the evaporating clouds and the future reality tree.
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Mohamed Hisham, Sri Lanka
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Practical Collaboration of Two or More Divisions In layman terms, collaboration begins with a broader and open minded thinking starting with divisional or departmental heads. It is always easy to come to the table and agree on the strategies to be used to achieve the overall company goal, but still divisions work in silos in achieving their independent goals first, my question is "How do you'll practically measure the collaboration and how do you make this marriage work?
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Steven Bleistein, Japan
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Response from Original Poster I appreciate all of the comments and reactions to my original post. Some very good advice and insights here. Mohamad Hisham however is echoing my concerns. BSC and Strategy Maps do not seem to offer a means to manage, measure and track cross-division collaboration in achievement of common goals.
@Elizabeth Coleman's practical proposal of establishing a cross-functional board is not a bad idea. However, I have concerns about the management overhead for this. It seems a bit heavy. Also, how would agreements be formally measured, tracked and exposed to the rest of the organization?
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Carel Venter, South Africa
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Cross Divisional Collaboration Strategy Based on my experience, it is possible and also crucial to optimize inter-divisional synergy.
The approach I use:
1. Start the strategy mapping process by recording a complete value-chain of the company/group (systems thinking/constrain management)
2. Build the strategy map for each division - linking objectives and initiatives where exploiting synergy enhances competitiveness of stakeholders (if no value is offered, do not participate) to explore a specific market segment or develop an internal resource efficiency.
3. Create and agree on a project plan with specific goals for each division and the collective to be achieved.
4. Create a high-level synergy group to ensure that strategy/resources/initiatives continue to add additional value and do not dilute specialist divisional offerings or margins.
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Francois Aye
Management Consultant, Switzerland
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Collaboration is an Intangible Asset Collaboration is indeed a must as the most value-creating processes often cross units of business. Collaboration is primarily an intention and cannot be measured as such. Only a favorable organizational and managerial framework can be set; and repeated collaboration behaviors can be identified and rewarded.
Organization design must favor collaboration: we have developed a methodology (and a tool) the "accountability process design" which dramatically raises employees' and managements' understanding of collaboration (compared with traditional job descriptions that "silo" employees in their function).
This is however not enough: corporate policies (such as performance, reward, competency management) must be aligned and value collaboration.
And this is still not enough: senior management must walk the talk and spread collaboration down the ladder. Like Jack Welsh (former CEO of GE) explained: "If two of my VPs can't agree on a decision, I help them the first time. If they come back to me a second time, I fire them both.
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Essens
Strategy Consultant, Netherlands
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Cross Divisional Collaboration Collaboration is a basic requirement for achieving adequate responses to complex problems. Networking within and between divisions in organizations is growing beyond just information exchange to ad ho...
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Eric Buining
Consultant, Netherlands
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Inherent Simplicity The basic assumption made within this discussion is that reality is complex. Complexity is usually defined as "the more data elements one has to provide in order to describe the system, the more compl...
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Vivek Joshi, India
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Cross Divisional Collaboration First examine if the objective is important to the organization as a whole ie, is it a part of the formulated corporate strategy. If so, then the individual divisions need to modify their divisional s...
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Eric Buining
Consultant, Netherlands
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Collaboration and Sun Tzu The basic assumption underlying the BSC is that the Critical Success Factors (CSF's) are included based on cause-effect relationships. My premise is that they are not. I think there are way too many C...
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Deepa
Consultant, India
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Cross Divisional Collaboration I think in tandem with what @Peter Essens is saying. Cross divisional collaboration cannot be on paper or on the leader's mind alone. Each one in each of the divisions collaborating has to think and a...
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masvimbo
Manager, Zimbabwe
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When Managing Cross-divisional Collaboration is Easy I think that if the benefits and advantages of the collaboration are clearly spelled out and if such benefits are fairly distributed among all the role players then very little else need to be done. Y...
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Mohamed Hisham, Sri Lanka
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Communicate Goal to Achieve Cross Divisional Collaboration Agree with Masvimbo totally, its all about clear communication and how the communication been executed. I believe in open, clear and as much information as possible about our end task need to be passe...
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Eric Buining
Consultant, Netherlands
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Networking and Communication are not the Answer Most of the comments I have seen are trying to solve symptoms and not root causes.
As long as departments and divisions are measured on their own local performance they will not collaborate. Nonethel...
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Amir Khodaparast, United Kingdom
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CoBRA Programmes and a Collaboration Blueprint This is an interesting discussion as it centres around our entire business value and propositions. We take a counterintuitive view. We DON'T RECOGNISE ORGANIZATIONAL BOUNDARIES, either internally or a...
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John Thomas
Business Consultant, Canada
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Cross Divisional Collaboration Strategy When the Strategy Map is cascaded down through the organization the KSFs should be mandatory to ensure both horizontal and vertical alignment.
Most of the organization should be able to respond direc...
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Jaap de Jonge
Editor, Netherlands
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Example of “Normalized Indicator” and “Composite Indicator” @John Thomas: Very interesting... Please can you give one example how you could use such a “Normalized Indicator” and “Composite Indicator”, bringing in your outliers?...
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John Thomas
Business Consultant, Canada
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Example of “Normalized Indicator” and “Composite Indicator” The "Normalized" indicator is one where all the indicators have a similar basis e.g. % and where a higher % means higher performance.
A Composite Indicator is a tool for calculating the Key Performan...
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