Published on October 18, 2016
Tata Housing has over the years evaluated and improved its strategy planning and deployment process (SPDP). In 2014, a CII Business Excellence Assessment had ranked the company as a ‘Benchmark Brand’, the highest score awarded to an applicant.
To improve the process further, the company began benchmarking the processes with Tata Steel’s strategy practices available on the EDGE portal. It also considered the BE assessment inputs from TBEM and the CII to improve its SPDP and in November 2015, the Tata Housing team studied the feedback reports – covering a three-year period – from the TBEM and CII BE assessments and identified eight areas for adoption.
The process began with organising 20 functional strategy workshops, followed by a corporate strategy workshop, where the inputs were consolidated and a strategy developed. Tools including PESTLE and SWOT were used to analyse and translate these into a strategy map. A corporate balanced scorecard (BSC) got deployed across the organisation and an improvement project based on the DMAIC (define, measure, analyse, improve and control) framework was undertaken.
The team studied the benchmarking of the BSC deployment practice and felt there were 63 possible areas where gaps could exist. Eighteen ‘actions’ were identified from the BE assessments and six practices from EDGE and 43 activities from the BSC deployment were finalised. SBE leaders analysed the inputs and prepared the action plans that were refined based on the MRC feedback and implemented through BE champions across functions.
The actions based on the three interventions – OFI Action Planning, EDGE and Benchmarking – were consolidated into 36 actions under the SPDP plan. The actions identified were appropriately tweaked to dovetail with the SPDP and a functional strategy closure template was designed and updated regularly by respective SBE leaders with inputs from functions.
The practice undertaken for improvement was related to the SPDP managed by the Strategy & Business Excellence (SBE) team comprising the SBE head and four SBE leaders, including a strategy lead. The support of the MD and CEO, the involvement of functional heads and BE champions and the drive and facilitation by SBE leaders ensured the successful implementation of the plan.
The Key Stakeholders
Some key stakeholders in the Receiver as well as Provider company were key in driving the implementation of the best practice. They are:
Tata Housing (Receiver company)
Tata Steel (Donor company)
The 4- tiered integrated strategy and planning process at Tata Steel ensures development of strategic objectives in line with the Vision, deployment of the same through a cascade of actions across the different business units and functions and a robust governance structure to review the progress of the short term actions and seeding strategies for the future. The process is characterised by fact based learning from the past, close involvement of a network of business analysts across the organisation and support of improvement group in driving enablers. The process is enlivened through a planned calendar of activities led by the leadership team.
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