Dynamic strategy of implementation

Abstract

The purpose of this thesis is to look at how a company can use a dynamic strategy process in order to adapt more quickly to changes in the surroundings, be it customers, owners or competitors. However, having adapted or defined a new strategy is not sufficient. The strategy must be implemented quickly in order to fulfil its purpose. In order to answer the question on how a strategy process can be done in a more flexible way, this thesis consider an alternative to the more well-known ideas from “The competitive advantage” (Porter, 1985, 1998). One alternative is found in “The end of competitive advantage” (McGrath, 2013). Theories from this book are studied and then used for the empirical study. The second question relates to what kind of change process can be used to quickly implement a new or adapted strategy. The foundation for this part comes from «An Improvisational Model for Change Management» (Orlikowski & Hoffman, 1997), (Jick & Peiperl, 2010). The empirical study uses the theories from (McGrath, 2013) and (Orlikowski & Hoffman, 1997) to study the companies in the UNINETT group, both from a strategy management and change management point of view. An assessment model from (McGrath, 2013) is used for the strategy management part, but a new assessment is developed as part of this thesis to assess the change management. The findings from the empirical study is analysed and shows that the theories from (McGrath, 2013) and (Orlikowski & Hoffman, 1997) indeed reveal issues that relates to the speed of the strategy and change process; specifically to disengagement of services, resource allocation and type of change process chosen for implementation of strategies. A separate analysis of the two assessments, representing their respective theories, is performed to see if there is a good match between the strategy process and the change process. The analyses show that there is a very good match and a proposal is made to how these two theories can be combined into a new model that covers both strategy management and change management.