This is how it works: Successful Enterprise Engineering

Successful Enterneering®, i.e. the development of the company in the areas of organisation, people and culture, requires a holistic and systematic approach. It’s not about the precise pre-definition of the content of a multi-year implementation plan. Nevertheless, we believe that successful Enterneering® should be an integral part of overall corporate strategy and planning. In keeping with this basic idea, a corporate strategy must first be in place. This means that defined strategic goals will have already been established, along with a long-term plan for achieving those goals. In addition, a suitable mechanism or process for operationalising the corporate strategy – i.e. making it viable in practice – must exist. As a rule, this type of operationalisation involves breaking down the corporate strategic goals into individual goals, for example, in the form of milestones with measurable success criteria and implementation dates. A strategic roadmap or a company backlog often forms a good basis for this.

If a company does not yet have an operationalised strategy, experience shows that systematic Enterneering® will not yield results. A suitable corporate strategy must first be defined.

If an operationalised strategy does exist, then the core elements of the corporate strategy form the starting point for the implementation of Enterneering®. The following key questions now arise:

Are there dedicated Enterneering® goals in the company’s strategy?

How are the Enterneering® goals anchored in the planning and implementation of the strategy?

Have dedicated resources (time, know-how, money) been planned for achieving the Enterneering® goals?

Who is responsible as the implementation coordinator for pursuing or coordinating the goals?

Depending on the answers to these four questions, different courses of action will emerge, all of which have the same goal: resolving the open questions. In the process of doing this, the practical experience already gained in other companies or constellations can and should be drawn upon to resolve the questions in such a way that the subsequent implementation of measures reduces foreseeable obstacles, risks or threats and optimises the chances for success.

GOALS

Reminder: Enterneering® consists of targeted work on the three corporate areas of organisation, people and culture. Accordingly, the goals of Enterneering® are also to be found and selected within these three categories. Typical examples are:

Future extent of development (structural measures, degree of digitalisation, process maturity, etc.)

Desired or necessary core capabilities within organisation (scalability, series maturity, interculturality, etc.)

Conformity to requirements (external/internal standards, customer requirements, legal conformity, etc.)

Changing work environments (hybrid workplaces, agility, digital formats, labour market conformity, etc.)

Development of leadership and corporate culture (gender shift, work-life blending, self-organisation, etc.)

The same quality metrics that apply to all strategic corporate goals also apply to Enterneering® goals. They must be meaningful and useful enough for the long term and generally be considered feasible. In addition, the purpose of the goal must be clearly defined as well as what successful implementation will ultimately achieve, i.e. the concrete contribution the achieved goal will make to the company’s success.

ANCHORING

There are several ways to anchor goals in a corporate strategy in such a way that they can be successfully achieved in practice and are also measurable. We recommend that an adequate form of anchoring be established that balances Enterneering® goals with other corporate goals. This means that, as far as possible, it must be ensured that, in the consciousness of the company and the people working in it, Enterneering® goals are just as important and significant as other goals, such as those from business development. The idea here is to avoid the emergence of parallel worlds when it comes to the perception and implementation of individual elements of the corporate strategy. In this way, the Enterneering® goals can be implemented as honestly, transparently, and authentically as possible. Possible mechanisms for or methods of anchoring include:

Traditional Milestone Plan

Company Backlog

Strategic Roadmap

OKR Tableau

Balanced Scorecard

(…)

Other success factors in anchoring the goals and implementing them in the company are a dedicated change approach, a communication concept and the involvement of promoters and multipliers.

RESOURCES

A common management error when dealing with development measures in the areas of organisation, people and culture is to put the effort (and possibly the pain) into defining and budgeting for appropriate and necessary resources in abbreviated planning models. This refers to statements such as “…this belongs to the standard tasks for managers or the HR department…” or “…we will clarify this in more detail during implementation – let’s get started first…” or “…these are soft factors anyway, which are difficult to plan …”. Experience shows that the success of the Enterneering® development measures is dependent on a clear understanding of the necessary resources. Typical elements of resource assessment in Enterneering® are:

Time requirements and top executive know-how

Time requirements and management-level know-how

HR expertise and resources

Internal communication resources

Budget for external support and media

IMPLEMENTATION COORDINATOR

For successful implementation of the Enterneering® goals, a clear commitment and minimum level of capacity among the management and top executives during the implementation period is mandatory. Only under certain conditions is delegation of the ‘client’ and ‘implementation coordinator’ roles to a single team (commonly, the HR team) a helpful option. Some tasks are difficult to delegate. Entrepreneurship is one of them: this role or task usually entails the cost of a partial loss of impact. A proven option is to use a temporary C-level resource with the necessary stature, who operates somewhat downwind of senior management. This person can be implemented as a kind of Change Master, comparable to a SCRUM Master, and take over the coordination of cross-departmental strategic measures. Ideally, this person should already have relevant practical and leadership experience and be as free as possible from conflicts of interest within the business organisation.

Are you interested in speaking with an expert about how to successfully implement Enterneering® in your company? If so, simply contact an Enterneer® to arrange a personal meeting.