Vision

The vision is how you imagine the future when seen in your minds eye.

By its definition, a vision is what the place we want to get to looks like, so will use words based on the future tense (such as ‘will or shall’) and contain visual descriptions (such as “a place where… “). They often include how the company would look and feel, what products we offer, and what the industry is doing in relation to us. A good vision should be currently out of reach but not completely unimaginable. They are long term in their nature, but unlike beliefs and values they will change - usually when they have been reached.

A side product of a vision is a BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal). This should take the vision one step further to predict what the ultimate utopia would look like, however it may depend on factors outside of our control.

Mission

If the Vision is where we want to be, missions are the big blocks of change to get us there.

Missions are action oriented and tend to say what we will do at a high level (“We will … build X” or “We will… do Y”). One or multiple (2-4) missions may be needed to reach the vision and they may last months or even years.

In a military context, missions require a number of people to do things which result in a change to the status quo. This is the same in business where missions may require people from multiple business units to come together to achieve objectives. Mission level strategy is therefor where planning, resource management, etc. starts to occur.

Objective

Each mission has a number of objectives associated with it to allow us to measure success.

Objectives are check points to inform us if we have completed an individual mission or not. Usually they are in the form of KPIs which are set when the missions are identified. As well as showing if further work is required to achieve the mission, objectives are also used to ensure that lower level strategies are contributing to achieving the mission.

Objectives should also be used to drive out lower levels such as Strategies and Tactics - for example “What strategies should we focus on to grow acquisitions by 60% before the start of the next financial year?”

Objectives are identified using the acronym SMART. This means that they should be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relative and Time-based to allow for accurate assessment.

Strategy

Strategies are the things which we think will achieve our objectives. They must link to at least one mission objective.

Strategies can be thought of Themes of work that we want to explore such as “improve brand appeal to mobile users”, or “Focus on new innovation”

The main point of the strategy is to provide a starting point to generate ideas on how they may be achieved – for example “What do we need to do to improve our brand appeal to mobile users?”. These ideas are called tactics.

Tactic

Tactics are those actions that we are going to do in order to fulfil the strategies.

Each strategy may have a number of tactics which could be undertaken by different business units. As the Mission is for a product - not all Tactics will require IT involvement.

The easiest way to think of tactics is as something which will change, whether that’s a new project, how a team works, what our brand perception is, or something else…

Tactics are best written in the format Verb-Noun (i.e. “Build Website”, “Recruit Director”, “Run TV Campaign” etc.) and usually fall into one of a number of groups such as Product, People or Process, Technology or Marketing Changes.