How does your records strategy meet your records tactics?

There are lots of strategy paradigms.

Under one of them, strategy is about the elements that you can plan ahead of time that raise your chance of being successful at dealing with a specific strategic problem - this includes all the longer term things that we can do - add resources, train people, develop and implement new technology.

Tactics is what happens over the kind of timeframe that you can't centrally plan and coordinate, and over which the addition of additional resources just isn't possible - the timframe where we have to make do with what we have.

In other words, tactical elements are those in which the outcome will be dictated by the skills and knowledge of the people on the ground already, the training they have had, local incentives and resources that are immediately available.

When strategy is done well, strategy meets tactics in a way that lets people connect the strategy about how to deal with our strategic problem, to the tactical capabilities, resources and incentives that will ultimately determine whether it happens.

One of the things I see in many programs, is a yawning gap between the strategy and the tactics.

The most common is an incentive gap.

The strategy says that "everyone is going to put everything in a records system" as the solution to some kind of strategic problem.

Tactically, the people are trained in how, they have the system, it's available.

There's just no reason for people to do the thing they're being asked to do - they don't make any gain that they appreciate, none of their management team feel like they make a gain, no one gets into any meaningful definition of trouble if they don't use it.

So they don't do it.

The other gap that's common is the resourcing gap.

The strategic aspiration is just not matched by the resources needed to meet it at the tactical level - and is never going to be, because that level of resource commitment doesn't make sense for the gains that the strategy promises to deliver.

This is the most important gap to observe, because almost any program can be made more successful by adding more resources.

Having trouble getting staff to sentence content? Hire a sentencer!

Having trouble getting them to put it in the records system? Hire a team administrator - someone you can KPI on records in the system.

Technology and training are also powerful substitutes for more resources.

They only help though, if we develop some awareness of the gap between our strategic aspirations, and the tactical capacity in our organisation.