IDK Webinar Special Series: The ClearPoint Strategy Success Framework

Welcome everybody. We're so glad that you could join us today for this very special webinar. I'm Joseph, I'm the Vice President of Customer Success here at clearpoint and I'm joined today with my colleague Heaven, who's a senior Customer Success Manager. And today we're going to be diving into the clearpoint Strategy Success Framework.

That's right. Whether you're new to clearpoint or looking to optimize your strategy execution, today we'll walk through the five key components of the Success Framework, which is designed to help organizations achieve strategic success by organizing, aligning, execute and executing their strategies efficiently.

Yeah, and today's webinar really marks the beginning of an important series. We've been running the I didn't know Clearpoint could do that webinar series now for well over 10 years and it's been a valuable resource for many people out there using clearpoint. But we want to begin to shift a little bit to, to share more about our Success Framework and then share how features in clearpoint tie directly to what you want to achieve in order for your organization to be successful in executing your strategy. So we'll focus on the framework and then we'll focus a lot on our newest version, clearpoint. Next, if you have any questions throughout our time today, feel free to drop them in the chat and we'll work to answer those for you.

Yes, we're excited about this new approach. Today we'll just scratch the surface of each area of the Success Framework, keeping things very high level throughout the five part series. We'll have more detailed sessions on each of these key areas to come throughout the year. During these sessions, we'll tie how the tool and various features support each of these pillars of success. We'll also include real examples from real customers who are achieving these pillars in a highly effective way and discuss how they're leveraging specific capabilities within clearpoint to drive their success.

Yeah, so we first want to start off by walking you all through the clearpoint Strategy Success Framework. So really what we've done here is we've taken decades of experience that we have in strategy and performance management and distilled down the essence of what you need to achieve to be successful and and executing your strategy. Now with this framework, what we really realized in talking to so many different customers over the years is that a lot of the elements in this framework are key reasons why people come to clearpoint, use our technology, but also partner with us for our expertise as they work on their strategy journey. So with all that knowledge and things that we've seen. Let's do a quick overview of the Success Framework, which is built into these five areas that organizations are looking to achieve. So first, we have organized strategy. A comprehensive, well organized and articulated strategy is key to every organization's success. Next, we have align organization. So aligning your organization around your strategy is crucial for ensuring that every department and employee and is working towards common goals. Next, we have managed projects. Project management is a core component of strategy execution. Aligning projects with strategic priorities ensures that resources are allocated efficiently and objectives are being met timely. Then we have communicate results. Transparent and effective communication of results is key to maintaining momentum in strategy execution. It helps in monitoring progress, identifying areas needing improvement and making informed decisions. Then finally, across the bottom, because it touches every aspect of the framework, but it's also a key component of the framework itself is simplify execution. Simplifying the execution process and how you manage your strategy is critical for maintaining focus and efficiency. And we want to give time back for you all to actually drive strategy forward as opposed to spending all your time compiling and reporting on a strategy. And one of the things that I really love about this framework, probably the most, honestly, is that it's designed to meet you and your organization wherever you are and grow with you over time. So myself and Heaven and our other colleagues on the customer Success team are here to be your coaches and help you pick and choose the different areas that you want to focus on for your organization and help you get the expertise as well as the feature engagement from the clearpoint that you need to be able to drive forward so we can accomplish something, celebrate that accomplishment and then choose the next area that we want to focus on. And we believe this is so important that we actually have a forthcoming ebook about this Success framework. And that ebook will be our textbook, if you will. And then this series that we're kicking off today and we are running throughout the year will be our various lessons.

These five areas work together to help organizations ensure their strategy is clear, their teams are aligned, projects are managed effectively, and results are communicated transparently. And across it all, we're aiming to simplify execution. But it's not just about the tools. It's about the right mindset and processes. We'll dive deeper into each. But first, let's pull back the curtain on how our refresh tool, clearpoint Next will support your goals and supports this framework.

Right. And throughout this series, we really do want to tie what we've done with the Success Framework and our expertise and strategy performance management into the large investment that we're making into developing clearpoint Next. So clearpoint is built to combine two seemingly opposite things. Enterprise software that's both powerful and intuitive. And if you think about all the different things that you may have in your clearpoint account, or the things that clearpoint is capable of doing, you know there's things in there like your overall corporate or organizational goals cascading all the way down to department goals and work plans, other plans that are in your organization as well as for some folks, cascading it all the way down to OKRs. For individuals, you have various measures or metrics or KPIs, powerful calculations and data analytics. Behind all of those, many are also using clearpoint for project and portfolio management, going deep into that area and using milestones or phases of projects. Then there's action items that folks are leveraging to keep track of day to day items. And then for a lot of organizations as well, they're using the Risk module to track risk to the organization or risk in their industry or broader macroeconomic environment. So there's a ton of different things that are happening in the highly customized tool that is clearpoint. So like our Success Framework, we've really built on decades of experience in strategy and performance management to develop clearpoint next. It's our biggest iteration yet and we're translating our knowledge in strategy and as strategy managers ourself and into a tool that can help organizations best manage their strategy.

Given the complexity of real world strategy, clearpoint must be complex to be powerful while still being easy to use. So our latest and biggest ever release is all about bringing simplicity to that complexity that we know exists out there and that you all face every day. That is what clearpoint Next means. New features, new with a new interface, and an approach to help admins and end users alike execute their strategy at the highest level. So let's review each of the areas of the Success Framework and share a little bit how clearpoint Next makes an impact.

Yeah, let's dive deeper into all these for sure and talk more about clearpoint Next. I'm excited.

Me too.

So the first area is organizing your strategy. And that's all about creating a structured, actionable plan that you can track and report on over time.

That's right. Organizing strategy involves breaking down your overarching goals into smaller, more manageable tasks, ensuring everything is aligned within the organization's mission. It's critical for eliminating confusion and driving clarity across all levels and departments of your organization.

And this is really where clearpoint software shines as Many of you know helping you manage your strategy through a visual easy platform that keeps everything in one place. So spreadsheets, Word documents, PowerPoints, all sorts of other tools where information and places where information is tracked all over the organization can come together into one central top level or corporate strategy, with others being tracked as well.

Looking at the clearpoint Next features around this pillar, we'll see an improvement to our Manage pages that will allow you to manipulate information into different views quickly and easily with full visibility of the changes as you're making them. We'll also have an improved import export capability which will allow you to export from that preferred view into Excel, add any bulk updates or changes, and import the file by just dropping it back on to the page. In addition to these features, clearpoint also helps you establish best practices for ownership, reporting, cadence and consistency across your plans, allowing you to allowing you and your organization to stay organized and informed. Our next pillar is Align Organization. This is where the real magic happens. Ensuring that everyone in the organization is pulling in the same direction. Eliminating silos and duplicate work between departments.

Absolutely. And this is one of the things I really love about clearpoint. When your entire organization is aligned with strategic goals, it ensures that resources are being utilized effectively and that everyone is clear on what they need to do to contribute to the success of the strategy. So clearpoint helps you visualize this alignment between your top level or corporate strategy and then all of the different division, department and team either strategies, work plans or other business plans that go along with it.

Exactly. And clearpoint Next features go deeper in helping you align your organization. We'll see improved and enhanced linkage trees to drill down across the alignment of your plan with important details pulled out into view for each element. We'll also have expanded discussion functionality so you can communicate with folks in your organizations directly on the page and in real time. We do currently have a Microsoft Teams integration, but we'll be seeing improvements to that as well with clearpoint next, so there'll be more to come with that and how you can communicate quickly and in real time with your organization.

Next up is managing projects and this is where strategy gets executed through specific actionable initiatives.

Managing projects is all about making sure that the work is being done and done well. With clearpoint, you can track the project progress of each project, measure its success, and ensure that it contributes to the broader strategic goals. You need real time visibility and streamlined processes to stay on top of everything.

Yeah, and project management, to me at least, is where the rubber meets the road, so to speak. You know, in our strategy we say, hey, these are the goals. Here are the measured results or the metrics or KPIs that we think are going to show our progress on those goals and the projects is what we select and say this is what we're actually going to do to improve our performance of the metrics and thereby accomplish our overall goals. And I really can't wait for some of these new features in clearpoint next. I think they're really going to take project management in clearpoint to a whole nother level. So first off, what we see here is a new Kanban functionality that's coming in clearpoint next. So in this example you can see all the initiatives are being tracked in a particular scorecard and we can see their initiatives that are being reviewed. And then we can see in each of the columns of the Kanban board initiatives that have been submitted for review, initiatives that are under review, initiatives that are approved. And then if there's any been that have been rejected and thankfully for this organization, none have been rejected yet. So when we think about these Kanbans, this is a really helpful visual tool that can be leveraged to to organize your various projects. And Kanbans are also available for other element types like your objectives or measures as well. So you can simply drag and drop to move the element in this case our projects into which column is most appropriate and you all as administrators are able to determine and create the different columns. So I've already seen some folks think about leveraging this on the project side in terms of project priority. So you can have projects that are classified as either low, medium or high priority and in meetings you can display them in this way and move them accordingly based on discussions and what's coming about. Additionally, on the project management side, we're enhancing our GANS charts and working on a few different items here to really bring those to life a little bit more and then to keep people informed and stay aligned throughout clearpoint. In Clearpoint next, we're going to be displaying the percent complete of initiatives and milestones more prominently so people can get a quick update or look into those particular items. Then more advanced project management functionality is on its way and is going to be coming in just a few months from now. So I won't share any of those secrets with you quite yet, but I'll tease that for a future webinar in our series.

Yeah, we'll have to check back and look at our webinar for managed projects here. Coming soon. So next let's talk about communication. Communicating Results effectively is critical to maintaining transparency and driving engagement across the organization.

Yeah, exactly. And when teams understand how their work ties into the big picture and and see the impact of their efforts, it boosts morale and ensures continued alignment. Clearpoint helps you create automated, customized reports that can keep everyone informed and engaged. And that includes folks that are internal to your organization, as well as sharing information outside your organization to keep other stakeholders in the loop. And when it comes to communicating your results, that's so critical for change management. Creating that visibility of how everybody fits into the strategic plan and getting that organizational buy in around your, your strategic vision and what you really want to accomplish as an organization.

Exactly. And clearpoint next will be supporting these goals by enhanced summary report and filter filtering capabilities, which will make report creation clearer and easily easier to do on the fly, so you can communicate exactly what is needed to key stakeholders within your organization. We'll also see improvements to our briefing book capabilities with six times faster exporting abilities and allowing you to get things done fast. And of course, we're making improvements to our publishing functionality so you can keep folks in your organization or constituents in the public informed of the progress you're making.

So finally, and last but certainly not least, we have simplifying execution. Because we know that strategy is only as good as this execution. But often that's the hardest part, because after all, 9 out of 10 organizations fail to execute their strategy. And we want you all to be the 1 in 10 that successfully executes execute strategy.

Right. Having the right tools in place and creating a strong and simple foundation is key to success. And this is where clearpoint's automation tools come into play. By automating tasks like data collection, reporting, automatic evaluations and follow ups, the execution process becomes seamless. This removes friction, allowing teams to focus on what really matters, which is getting results.

And in clearpoint Next, we're excited about a lot of the functionality that come in this area, so we're continuing to invest heavily in our Workspaces feature. It's available currently in clearpoint, but it's one of those things that we are really doubling down on and believe it'll be really critical. So Workspaces allows you as admins to be able to create a view that, that your end users can use to simply log into clearpoint, see what they're responsible for or in charge of making updates on, and make all those updates right here in one spot. So we're adding new pods and new ways to think about the workspace functionality so you can really empower your users to get what they need done so you all can execute your strategy at the highest level. Also, as you know, clearpoint's been making a lot of investments in next generation AI capabilities and we believe strongly that there's a tremendous amount of potential here as we create these different AI assistants that you can leverage inside of the tool. So currently in clearpoint you're able to use AI in a number of interesting ways. You can use it to build out your strategic plans. You can also use it for generating analysis. It can also be used to copy edit text. It can be used to create recommendations, especially through the ask me anything functionality. And one of the ways that it works currently in clearpoint is that a dialog box will pop up and open, which is helpful and useful. But in clearpoint, next we want to move some of this AI into these slide out drawers you can see here. By doing that, that allows you to interact with the AI in a more meaningful way while also still being able to see and access all, all the detail and information that you have on your particular page for the element that you're tracking in this example, a measure. Then over time we're investing further and further into AI. So we have things that can do, currently we have things that can do a summary write up of a particular scorecard. It's super helpful for you to be able to leverage that. But we want to continue to layer in more AI and, and create a system where you're able to use these assistance in really meaningful ways to drive forward not only the updating process, but also really using AI as a thought partner within your account when you're looking to evaluate and execute your strategy. So in summary, the clearpoint Strategy Success Framework supports the five key pillars of successful strategy management and execution. Clearpoint is built as a tool to support these five components. And these components all work together to make it easier for organizations to achieve their strategic goals. And in fact, we believe in these so strongly that we've developed a strategy evaluation. And the strategy evaluation is a set of questions across each of these five areas which you and other members of your organization can answer. And then we take those responses to about 100 total multiple choice questions and review them and create a report for your organization that includes some of the strengths, some of the opportunities for improvement, and also some recommendations on what you may want to focus on next in your strategic management journey. So as we talked about at the beginning, myself, Heaven and our whole team here at clearpoint is there to be your coach and support the development of your organization and the maturation of strategy and performance management over time and this strategy framework and this strategy evaluation is a really important tool in our toolkit that we can leverage to help to support you all. So if you're interested, just let your customer Success manager know we within your success portal inside of clearpoint is where we can run through and get all these questions answered and then we can create the report for you and then deliver that ahead of time so you have time to review it and meet with you to walk through it and answer any questions and clarify as well.

Exactly. Tools like this, clearpoint's capabilities and the enhancements coming in clearpoint Next, coupled with our team's strategy expertise are all designed to make strategy management simpler than ever. As we said at the beginning today, we're staying at a very high level with the Success Framework in clearpoint Next to kick off this new series, but subsequent episodes will dive deeper into each of these five pillars. If you'd like to learn more about clearpoint Next, let your CSM know and we can arrange a tour with our Product manager. And and as Joseph mentioned, also let us know if you're interested in the strategy evaluation. Our sales team is also doing monthly drop in demos of clearpoint Next which can be found on our events page. You can also keep a lookout for our upcoming ebook on the Success Framework, which will be your supplemental textbook and for our ongoing webinar series. Thanks again everyone for joining us today.

Yeah, thanks so much everybody. And we do see a question that's come in that I want to make sure that we answer. I'm sure it's a question on a lot of folks minds. The question is what's the timeline around the rollout of Clearpoint Next and then will there be additional training on the new features of Next that are not a recorded video or how to document? So in terms of timeline we'd like to have currently we do have access available. If you want to reach out to our team, we can have you meet with our Product manager, as angel mentioned, to walk through a lot of the new features and functionality. We are aiming to have clearpoint Next by the summer be a spot where you could have your end users go in and leverage clearpoint Next and then looking for a broader rollout later in the year. Now we are going to have our current version of clearpoint available for quite a bit longer and actually don't have a sunset date for that yet because we want to give organizations plenty of time to be able to move over to Clearpoint Next at their own pace. And then as part of this rollout in terms, we will have a fully updated support center, continue to do trainings, a lot of our training and event calendars. A little bit later this year, as clearpoint Next becomes available, the trainings that we host every month will shift over into clearpoint Next so we can begin to do that. We'll have several other documents and really helpful resources as well, because we want to make sure that we're empowering you all as admins with the tools and information that you need to help roll your organizations over to clearpoint Next when you're ready. So we'll continue to keep everybody posted on that in our newsletters and in these various webinar series, as well as your customer. Success managers will continue to be in touch around all these resources as well. So thank you so much everybody for joining. I know we are super excited about clearpoint Next, really excited about the success framework and how we can use the two together to help drive your organizations forward. And we're looking forward to this webinar series and think it'll be a fantastic one. Coming up in April, we'll be diving deep into organized strategy, more lessons around that and more features and functionality that tie to that as well. So thanks so much everyone for joining and happy reporting.