Highlights

1. Management empowered to connect initiatives directly to the organization's strategy
2. Realizing benefits and returns made possible through accurate tracking and reporting
3. Streamlined decision-making to help make the right decisions more quickly

Perley Health is a forward-looking and innovative organization with a mission to transform care for veterans and seniors. Despite being an operations-heavy organization, strategy and transformation have been critical priorities for their leadership team.

While COVID-19 shifted the organization’s immediate priorities and halted some strategic initiatives, its vision and mission never wavered. Neither did the leadership’s focus and belief in bringing agility and adaptability to their strategic planning and execution.

Clearing roadblocks on the path to ambitious growth

Rebecca Wilson joined Perley Health as the Director of Strategy and Transformation to help the leadership bring business observability and embed strategic thinking in their teams.

COVID-19 made it difficult for Perley Health to forecast its future because of an uncertain environment. They realized something had to change. There were a few challenges with their strategic planning and execution processes:

• The long-range approach to Strategic Planning assumed some level of stability in the external environment 
• Departmental planning and reporting were ad-hoc and differed between departments and initiatives
• It wasn’t always clear how success was measured. Realizing benefits and quantifying returns from investments made in initiatives was inconsistent
• Strategic and departmental plans were being developed in PDF and Word documents, sometimes siloed from each other and often with duplicate initiatives

All of these challenges came in the way of Perley Health’s ambition. They were slowing them down and leading to inefficiencies.

Doubling down on org-wide strategy execution involvement

Being a proponent of using technology to drive results, Rebecca came across Cascade and saw an opportunity to solve the challenges Perley Health was facing.

The first thing Rebecca and the Perley Health team did was to connect all their strategic plans and initiatives in Cascade. This brought transparency for their teams into how various initiatives align with the organization’s priorities, allowing resources to be focused on the right initiatives and eliminating duplication and wastage.

Quantifying results and success allowed the leadership to realize benefits and connect returns to initiatives in a structured and consistent manner. They had greater visibility on how resources were being invested into goals and improvements. The leadership and management were enabled to have conversations around ROI and track progress toward their mission.

With this newfound empowerment, the management and different teams could propose business cases and seek investments in forward-looking opportunities, which were being maintained as a roster inside Cascade. Clear visibility and alignment to strategic priorities meant the leadership could make the right decisions and fund the right initiatives more quickly.

“We’re strengthening our ability to prioritize and make strategic decisions. The right decisions can be made more quickly now.”

Chasing ambitious goals more confidently

Having the right tools, frameworks, and governance in place is enabling Perley Health to make strides toward its mission with confidence.

They’re able to monitor within Cascade the progress they’re making towards doubling the number of seniors they serve and establishing their reputation as a center of excellence in frailty-informed care.

“If you’re using PowerPoint or pdf documents of your strategy, know that people aren’t interacting with your strategy as meaningfully as they could be. Cascade helped us go from a document to something that people are living and breathing every day. Strategies are intended to be operationalized - that’s why they exist.” Rebecca explains.