Mindyasa was initially hired to create ACT’s North Star to provide clarity to all employees and stakeholders on the enterprise’s purpose, mission and future hopes and dreams. Armed with a new rallying purpose to “fight for fairness in education and create a world in which everyone can discover and fulfill their potential”, ACT’s CEO retained Mindyasa to support her to create a three year strategy plan and embed an ongoing strategy process.

Having established common nomenclature for key terms, we led ACT’s CEO through a process to establish a set of strategic priorities. These were shared and refined with the Senior Management Team (SMT) along with alignment on key principles including establishing the senior management’s accountability on an individual and a collective basis for the delivery of the plan.

With this alignment and the North Star and strategic priorities to serve as a compass, we lead a series of workshops to identify the key priority market segments and priority initiatives. Prior to the workshops, the SMT were given a standardized template to complete to capture plans and activities for their individual areas of responsibility. Built upon market data, these plans covered goals, initiatives, capability, risks, dependencies, budgets and a high level timeline. By sharing and discussing the functional plans, the SMT was able to build up a common understanding of tactics and dependencies across functions.

In partnership with Finance, revenue and OI forecasts for each priority market segment were developed. Functional leads were requested to submit department budgets and a trade-offs process was developed and completed to ensure that the right work was being prioritized and that functional level budgets were aligned to the strategy. Difficult decisions were made with respect to initiatives that needed to be placed into the backlog.

Finally, in collaboration with the CEO and the SMT, Mindyasa produced a set of high quality communication materials including presentations and white papers. Mindyasa then designed a strategy planning and management process. Designed to become an integrated part of the annual management cycle, the process enables ACT to keep track of progress and pivot when necessary.

Key outputs:

● A three year strategy plan – designed by the SMT, with enterprise wide planned objectives and detailed plans for priority market segments and functions
● Communication materials – presentation for Board of Directors, long form strategy plan narrative, presentation for Team Members
● A repeatable strategy review and planning process, with clear roles and responsibilities

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