How to add and manage a strategy in the strategy board

If you’re ready, here are the steps to create a new strategy item.

Create a new strategy

Click on the New Strategy button on the top right-hand corner. It will open the editing screen shown in Figure 4!

Figure 4: Add or Edit New Strategy Item

In the above screen, Add the following details:

1. Give your strategy a name using the Title text box.
2. Add a Description of your strategy. Here you can outline your strategy in detail. The rich text editing features allow you to develop a visually appealing documentation.
3. Select a Mode between Private and Public:
   1. Private mode allows you to not share the strategy item with anyone at all or only with key stakeholders. When you choose the private mode, a new field pops up which allows you to share your strategy item with specific team members.
   2. Public means the strategy is shared and is visible for your teams.
4. Add a Vision and Mission statement in the respective fields. Your strategy is usually a derivative of your organization’s vision and mission. Again, the rich text editing feature allows you to create a visually appealing document.
5. Click on Save. This creates a new strategy item. If you decide not to create the strategy item, you can click on Cancel.

Best Practice

Strategy is usually managed within a time frame of 3 to 5 years. Most IT organizations pick a time frame of 3 years because that is a reasonable time in which the external environment is more predictable.

For non-IT organizations where, technological change is slightly slower, it is possible to pick a longer time frame. Nevertheless, any strategy that has a lifetime more than that of 5 years is not advisable.

Please note that the strategy board doesn’t implement this as a restrictive time frame! Therefore, you are free to choose any time frame of execution!

Delete a Strategy Item

1. Select the strategy item you want to delete from the drop-down list of values that lists all strategy items.
2. Click on the Delete button next to the drop-down list. Refer to Figure-2 to find where the delete button is located.
3. A dialog to delete strategy shall pop up. Click OK to delete. Click Cancel to go back.

Just remember that deleting a strategy removes the entire set of Objectives, Initiatives and Roadmaps associated with it. You cannot undo this change. Therefore, you must exercise caution when deleting a strategy item.

Add a time frame to a strategy

The next important step after creating the strategy item is to set a time frame for the strategy execution. It is within this time frame that all activities involving the strategy must be completed.

The time frame is independent of the strategy hierarchy. That is to say that Items are not contained within a time frame. So, if you add or delete a year, it won’t add or delete items that were earlier created within that year.

Just think of the time frame as a reference frame to understand the time boundedness aspect of the items in the strategy board hierarchy. When you move around items like initiatives or roadmaps which have a reference time frame as data points, the data is pulled from the time frame and updated or reflected in the respective item.

Figure 5: Add or Delete Time Frame

Add years to the time frame

1. When you create a strategy item the current year is the only one that is added to the time frame, by default. For instance, if you are adding the strategy item in the year 2021, then that year is added by default to your time frame.
2. To add more years to the time frame, hover over the time frame. You will see two “+” symbols towards the left and right side of the time frame. Refer to Figure 4 for clarity. Click on the “+” symbol to add the years to your strategy.
   1. You can click the + symbol on the left side to add the previous year.
   2. You can click the + symbol on the right side to add the next year.

Strategy Backtracking

The most common case is that you’d be in the middle of executing your strategy. You might want to backtrack a few years and add initiatives and roadmaps from the past years.

Why is backtracking important?

There are two reasons why you might want to backtrack:

1. You might want to simply document the high-level initiatives and roadmap items from the past years. The goal is not to track the data points, but just to have a record.
2. Strategy board is a relatively new feature of Prakya. If you had been an old customer, you have all the work already documented in Epics, Features and User Stories. You may want to link all of that to the roadmap items and track them too.

Delete years from the time frame

1. The delete buttons appear on the left most year and the right most year of the time frame. This is done to ensure the continuity aspect of the time frame. You can’t have a strategy that starts from year 2019 flowing over to 2022 with a missing 2020 in between!
2. To delete years from the time frame, you can click the delete icon shown in Figure 5. Clicking on the icon brings up a prompt to confirm your delete. Click on the “Yes” option to delete the year and “No” option to keep the year intact.
3. Since the time frame is not a container that holds items from the strategy board hierarchy, the year is just removed while all the other items are kept intact.

If you have created Initiatives and Roadmap Items, they are simply advanced to the corresponding periods of the next year or the previous year as the case maybe.
For example, if you delete the left most year, then the items would be moved to the corresponding time period of the next year. If you delete the right most year, then the items would be moved to the corresponding time period of the previous year.