Executive Summary

The Abu Dhabi Department of Energy was established in accordance with Law No. 11 of 2018 to drive the Emirate’s energy transition efforts with a clear focus on creating a sector that promotes economic growth and social development, and environmental sustainability. Inspired by the Abu Dhabi 2030 plan for a sound, secure, and sustainable economic future, the Department of Energy is responsible for the planning and direction of Abu Dhabi’s energy sector. The role includes enacting policies and regulations and developing strategies to ensure an effective energy transition that underpins Abu Dhabi’s sustainable growth.

Challenges

The customer decides on the strategy plan and wishes to figure out ways to operationalize their strategy robustly. The primary challenge was that the strategy has to be implemented in geographically distributed locations, across several sectors, sometimes involving multiple departments also. Each strategy will have priorities and directives which may be envisaged for the future. These directives will have multiple focus areas which may be jointly executed or may not be.

In addition, the progress of a strategy has to be measured, both in terms of finance and in terms of performance. The measured progress has to be displayed in an intuitive way to the top-level Government officials and the bureaucrats.

Solution

a) Creation of modules:

When Profit.co was approached for creating the modules for operationalizing their strategy, the team divided the strategic plan into strategic directives. These strategic directives are the consolidated objectives of the department, that are broad, high-level areas of focus.

While the strategic plan gives the roadmap to grow the execution and business, strategic priorities are numbers given to the goals, depending on their importance. While defining the priorities, the description and the enabler of the priorities are also specified. Drilling further down, these strategic drives and priorities have to be broken down into strategic focus areas. Strategic Focus areas help the management processes direct to specific missions of the organization. It will help the business success and give the clear direction of the goals so that progress can be measured.

These strategic focus areas have to be translated into initiatives and milestones, all of which become measurable. A strategic Initiative is to set the right goal to accomplish an organizational objective. Strategic initiatives include milestones with budget and planned start and end date.

B) Measurable framework

Based on the initiative- with- objective association and by the key results progress made with the budget amount or without budget amount, a user from the department will be able to track it from the dashboard. Once the check-in is made with the budget amount, it will be tracked as part of the initiative progress with the milestone. The overview of the progress of the initiatives is calculated based on the % of Initiatives by Directorates (which is the # of Initiatives (Current Quarter) that are linked with each department in the initiative) % of Initiatives by Focus Area (which is measured as the number of Initiatives that are associated in the focus area in an average)
% of Initiatives by Priorities (Where # of Initiatives by Priorities will be calculated for each Priority,as the number of Initiatives associated with that Priority)

Overall Delivery of Strategic Initiatives can also be shown as the comparison of the planned progress completed by this FY and carry over to the next FY with remaining progress.

For each department, to track the initiative status, as a percentage, it will be taken as a ratio of the sum of Initiatives with the status Completed, Ongoing, Ontime and Not started to the total number of initiatives in that particular department.

The progress of the initiative can be compared as planned vs actual in current and the past month.
The financial performance can be tracked to show the Budget Vs Actual Expenditure for each department. The Budget amount is given while creating Milestones and the Actual Expenditure is the amount spent by each department.
Likewise, for each department, we can calculate the planned progress % and actual progress %, where the planned progress % will be calculated as the average of planned progress % of all departments.

C) OKRs for strategy execution within a measurable framework

The execution of the strategy of the department can be elegantly modeled with the top-down approach of the
OKRs. Each of the initiatives and milestones of the focus areas can be modeled as an OKR where each initiative can have the most important Objectives with 2-5 Key Results under each Objective. Each Key Result becomes measurable with the tracking of the Key Performance Indicators (KPI). With each check-in, progress is tracked and the progress of the strategy can be visualized in a dashboard in the most intuitive way. Profit.co’s OKR Platform alleviates the difficulties in strategy execution by bringing it into a measurable framework and tracking it periodically.

This way, OKRs ensure that corporate strategy can be executed precisely by the various sectors and departments.