How can you align resource allocation with strategic objectives?

Assessing your current situation is paramount to effective resource allocation. By understanding your organization's vision, mission, and objectives, along with a comprehensive analysis of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, you can align resources strategically. Additionally, stakeholder mapping, customer segmentation, and competitive analysis further aid in optimizing resource allocation by pinpointing key stakeholders, target customers, and competitors. Embracing this foundational step equips businesses with a clear roadmap, ensuring resources are wisely allocated to achieve desired outcomes.

Understand runway of resources, stack rank priorities, and appropriate resources accordingly. The action items that take the least resources relative to the potential resources they can bring in (investment, revenue, visibility, earned media). Ultimately, take stock in an honest and calculated manner.

The OKR framework is not used to define your strategic objectives; this is part of the strategy. The OKR framework takes the direction from the strategy and then provides a means of ensuring alignment across the organisation to achieve the strategic aims.

I try not to talk about 'strategic objectives' and generally split these into two: - objectives: where do you actually want to go? What would success mean in your context? - strategy: how are you going to get there? And as some of the other contributors have pointed out, what frameworks will you use to make sure it's working? In my experience, this is the place where opinions will vary, sometimes significantly, and inevitably some people will have to 'live with' decisions they don't 100% buy. This is not an excuse to railroad, decision makers should all feel the direction is worth exploring and that they can set their teams up for success.

Not everything is an emergency and objectives should not change daily. Remember that people need time to implement changes - mentally and physically. Remember the saying, "A watched pot never boils"? Set your goals, prioritize, and set up milestones to review them - then let your team go and do it - don't micromanage. You can use the above models for scoring as mentioned, yes, but don't overcomplicate your business goals by onboarding complex tools to disseminate. In most scenarios, if you can't fit it on a bar napkin (or, really, a single sheet of paper) - it's too much.

There are many options for prioritizing, what is essential is that your organization pick the best tool for prioritizing that can be sustained and become a disciplined habit for the organization, teams and individuals. In my experience, keeping priorities transparently communicated as well as open up input is key for ongoing communication and can boost the potential of successful goal achievement. Sometimes keep it simple is the best strategy.

People make or break an organisation. The right people, even with the crappiest of resources will find a way to get things done. More often than not, an evaluation of whether you have the right people in the right roles is simply overlooked. Sometimes, this reflects in the leadership's consistent effort to 'fix' someone to fit a role instead of reevaluating whether this is the individual they need for a role. So when evaluating whether you're allocating effort, money and people on the right things, also evaluate if the right people are in the right roles. Whether this means moving people around or bringing new people in. You may be surprised the impact shuffling people between roles they can thrive in can make.

As much as allocation of ‘right’ resources is important, it is critical to ensure there is buy-in and commitment to the strategic objectives with the people assigned and other stakeholders. This can be done by clearly communicating the strategic objectives and it’s positive impact, investing time in understanding people concerns if any and address/mitigate them.

This, in most cases, is where it all breaks. Whatever is not measured or tracked, is most likely to fall through the cracks.

Whilst perceived as an afterthought, this is the most crucial step for creating long-term success. Priorities shift. Challenges arise. Some things don't work as well as expected yet others will create incredible results and warrant deeper investment. By having the systems in place to monitor results and refine decision-making, your organisation stays adaptable. It places you in prime position to take advantage of the best opportunities and avoid the biggest threats. To implement this there are 3 key steps. 1. Get clear on which metrics are the most meaningful to track. 2. Determine a clear format to present those metrics to relevant stakeholders. 3. Decide a cadence for analysing, reporting and creating strategy based off the data.

I tend to find the idea of labeling human capital under the umbrella of ‘resources’ somewhat anachronistic. Unlike things we consume, deployment of human capital ought to be treated in a class of its own. Leaders should always think of ways to build human capital, rather than just throwing humans into the corporate machine. This will become ever more important as we understand the implication of AI on workplaces.

As we face unprecedented challenges in terms of human resources, it is high time to rethink our approach from a process and technology perspective. Resource allocation should focus on improving processes and technologies to ease the burden on managers so that they focus on delivery and client satisfaction. This is where concepts such as citizen development model plays a crucial role in shaping the businesses of tomorrow and in re-aligning resource allocation to strategic objectives.