Ask a CAO how much time their organization spends tracking its strategic plan. The honest answer is that they do not know.
That is not negligence. The time does not show up anywhere. It is scattered in crumbs across forty calendars, under labels like « update », « committee prep » or nothing at all. No budget line carries it.
The problem is that you cannot reduce a cost you have never counted. So let us count it.
A warning before we start: the ranges below are working assumptions, not measured data. They come from what we see during implementations, and they vary enormously from one organization to the next. Replace them with your own. The method is what matters, not our numbers.
The first cost: the people who update
This is the most visible cost, and it is almost always the smallest.
Someone responsible for three actions updates their status once a month. If the information is at hand, that takes ten minutes. Call it thirty minutes a month to be generous, including the time to recall where things stand and write two useful sentences.
Six hours a year, per person.
In an organization with forty action owners, that is two hundred and forty hours. Written out, the number looks large. In practice it is a month and a half of work spread across forty people and twelve months. Nobody feels it.
Hold on to that number, because what follows is counterintuitive.
The second cost: the people who consolidate
This is where it starts getting expensive, for a reason that has nothing to do with the work itself.
A manager who has to produce their department's progress update for the quarterly review does not spend their time analyzing. They spend it chasing. They email six people, three answer, they chase the other three, they receive files in three different formats, they retype everything into a spreadsheet.
Count two hours a quarter if everything comes in quickly, half a day if it drags. Call it ten hours a year, per department.
In the same six-department organization, that is sixty hours. Less than the first cost, but concentrated on six people who are usually the busiest in the building.
The third cost: senior leadership
Four ninety-minute review meetings is six hours. Add preparation and reading, say four more. Ten hours a year.
That is small, and it should be small. Senior leadership is not supposed to do the tracking. It is supposed to decide based on tracking done by others.
When this cost swells, it is a symptom. It means leadership has taken on work that should have stayed further down.
The fourth cost: the annual report, and this is where it goes wrong
In most public and parapublic organizations, the annual strategic plan report occupies one person close to full time for two to three weeks. Call it eighty to one hundred and twenty hours.
One person. One deliverable. And by a wide margin, the heaviest of the four.
Look at the total: roughly two hundred and forty hours of updating, sixty hours of consolidation, ten hours of leadership time, and one hundred hours of reporting. A little over four hundred hours a year for a mid-sized organization.
And now the question that matters: which of those four produces new information?
What you pay for twice
The first produces information. The second moves it. The third consumes it. The fourth rebuilds it.
That is the important word. Rebuilds.
Those hundred hours of reporting do not discover anything. They recover information that already existed, that someone entered once, then lost in an email, a local spreadsheet or minutes nobody filed. It gets re-entered, validated a second time, reformatted.
In other words, the most expensive item on the list creates no new value at all. It repairs a loss.
And it gets worse. Because the report comes eleven months after the year's first events, part of the information is no longer recoverable. People have changed roles, details have faded. What reaches council is therefore both expensive and approximate.
Run the calculation in your own organization
It takes an hour, and four questions.
- How many people in the organization are responsible for at least one action in the plan? Multiply by six hours.
- How many people consolidate information for a level above them? Ask them honestly how long a full chase takes. Multiply by how many times a year.
- How many hours of review meetings, preparation included, for senior leadership?
- How long did the last annual report take, from the first collection email to the tabled document? Use the real number, not the planned one.
Add it up. Then ask the one question that leads to a decision: of that total, how much goes to rebuilding information that already existed?
In most of the organizations we work with, the answer is around a quarter. In some, it is half.
What the number is for
Not for making anyone feel guilty. The updating time, the forty people, is not waste: it is the normal price of a plan that is actually tracked. Trying to cut it would be a mistake, because it feeds everything else.
The real lever is elsewhere. It sits in the gap between information entered once and information re-entered three times. When strategic directions, objectives, actions and indicators live in one place, and each owner updates their own information at the moment it happens, the second cost shrinks and the fourth becomes a reading exercise.
The annual report does not disappear. It changes nature. Instead of three weeks of collection followed by two days of analysis, it is two days of analysis, full stop.
So this is not time saved. It is time moved, from reconstruction to thinking. And that is considerably better work.
Seeing where the time goes in your organization
Our strategic execution trilogy explains why the gap widens between the adopted plan and what actually gets done.
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