When a business is set-up, the first thing that is worked upon is the strategy and the organizational structure that will drive it. There are many ways to define the strategy, but the best way is one that ties up with the vision you have for your business and the one that is most optimal in terms of resource utilization. Strategic management courses in India cover this key aspect of businesses. One of the most prevalent strategies that is used is the functional one.
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Some key elements about a functional strategy are shared below for better understanding –
- It is designed to meet the requirements of the functions – While the overall approach is aligned and flows into the organizational strategy at the broad level, the functional strategy is designed to meet the goals of the functions that are present within an organization. This works well for organizations which are structured in this manner and also have a lot of decision making being done based on the function.
- The goals are reflective of the function’s responsibilities – The business goals stem from the functional area’s responsibilities and link its purpose to the objectives. This helps to ensure that the resources aligned to that functional area are the right fitment and also able to use their skills and expertise to achieve these goals. Each function has a crucial role to play in business performance. Such a strategy ensures that the role is not only clearly defined, but also tracked and monitored to ensure that it performs.
- A thorough analysis of the function’s strengths and gap areas is needed – A detailed analysis of the function’s strengths and gap areas will be the cornerstones of this strategy. It will make sure that one has all the great portions can be leveraged and the developmental ones can be worked upon. It might result sometimes in functions operating in silos or based on their own goals. While it might work well at times.
- Functional strategy means specialists will be present – The strategy is aimed at creating specialists within the firm and not generalists. That means that each function has its own experts and even sub-domain experts who specialize in their roles. The focus on technical know-how or functional knowledge is high for such a strategy. A big challenge that it might present at times is the issue of cross functional job rotation.
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This is the overall approach that a functional strategy in business has. It has its own pros and cons, and depending on size of operations companies might choose to use this or another form of strategy.
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