Why I Founded StrategyXF: To Master Strategy Execution & Drive Business Outcomes

My Journey in Strategy Execution

With over 25 years dedicated to helping organizations optimize their strategy execution capabilities, my career has provided diverse perspectives on challenges organizations and different functions experience.

I began as a quantity surveyor managing multiple construction sites across London, which helped hone my skills in project delivery and coordination. As a project manager and PMO leader in varied industries, I orchestrated complex initiatives and aligned teams to strategic goals. Later, I led management consulting teams and practices to help organizations to design operating models that streamlined strategy execution. Most notably, as Chief Product Officer at UMT360, a Gartner-recognized leader in strategic portfolio management, I built software solutions and frameworks to help companies align execution with strategy and optimize investment decisions.

This multifaceted experience—spanning project management, management consulting, framework development and innovative software solutions—revealed a persistent truth: despite decades of capability improvement investments, organizations still struggle to execute their strategies effectively which is impacting business results.

The Persistent Struggle with Strategy Execution

Organizations continue to face significant challenges in executing their strategies, directly impacting performance and competitiveness.

The statistics are conclusive.

• Gartner reports that 70% of strategic investments fail to deliver expected outcomes

• The Economist Intelligence Unit reports that 45% of executives acknowledge struggles in bridging strategy formulation and implementation

Over the past two decades, encouraged by industry analysts, management consultancies, and strategy execution software vendors, organizations have invested in various methodologies with the intent to optimize their execution capabilities:

• In the early-to-mid 2000s, integrating project and portfolio management (PPM) aimed to optimize investment selection and delivery, but organizations often adopted a one-size-fits-all PPM approach across the enterprise, ignoring diverse team needs.

  
  

• By the early 2010s, lightweight cloud-based PPM tools allowed different teams within the same organization to choose solutions tailored to their needs, often leading to fragmentation and misalignment.

  
  

• In the mid-to-late 2010s, born from frustration with traditional PPM, many organizations embarked on enterprise-wide agile transformations, shifting from project-to-product mindset. Invariably this agile transformation mistakenly started bottom up with agile execution teams, and soon organizations encountered the same top-down enterprise scaling challenges as PPM, leaving companies no better off than they were with traditional PPM.

The challenge with both the PPM and agile transformation was that the solutions were often positioned as one-size-fits-all, failing to recognize that different teams within the same organization may need to operate differently and have unique requirements. Despite the significant investments over the past two decades, these capability improvements have failed to deliver sustainable improvements in strategy execution, perpetuating a cycle of missed opportunities, wasted resources, and diminished competitiveness that undermines business performance.

Why Organizations Are Still Struggling

To successfully deliver on their strategy, organizations must design and implement a cohesive operating model to orchestrate strategy execution across all teams and functions.

As mentioned, organizations often made the mistake of adopting one-size-fits-all methodologies, which usually started with a new bottom-up “silver bullet” way to execute projects, rather than designing an operating model that integrates strategic portfolio management, business and enterprise architecture, project execution, and change management best practices and unites disparate teams to effectively orchestrate strategy execution.

In the absence of a cohesive operating model different functions— Strategic Planning, Finance, IT, HR, business and IT PMOs, Business Architects, Enterprise Architects, Portfolio Owners, Program Managers, Scrum Masters, and Change Managers and more—adopt their own best practice processes to support their specific roles, leading to conflicting or overlapping processes that result in a fractured operating model, impairing timely decision-making and alignment. Consistently organizations fail to acknowledge that for strategy execution to be successful, processes need to be personalized to their unique culture, operational dynamics, and industry context, rather than assuming a one-size-fits-all methodology will work.

Probably most importantly, it is time for executives to face the reality that their sub-optimal strategy execution capabilities are significantly impacting business results, eroding value and competitiveness. Rather than burying their heads in the sand and accepting this as an inevitable cost of doing business, the C-suite must prioritize and sponsor enterprise-wide capability improvements to unite all functions and align investments with strategic goals.

While no single function holds all the answers, establishing a Strategy Execution Office (SEO) or Enterprise PMO (but let's not call it that), reporting to and sponsored by the C-suite, is the first right step to deploying and successfully adopting these capability improvements to drive strategic alignment and transforming execution across the organization.

Why I Created The Strategy eXecution Forum (StrategyXF)

In 2025, I reached a crossroads in my career and was fortunate enough to be able to take some time to assess the strategy execution market to identify gaps and decide where I want to focus my efforts over the next 5 to 10 years. With this in mind, rather than establishing yet another management consulting firm or building the next silver bullet strategy execution software product, I saw the need to build a community of like-minded strategy execution professionals representing all functions—Executives, Strategic Planning, Finance, IT, HR, PMOs, Business Architects, Enterprise Architects, Portfolio Owners, Program Managers, Scrum Masters, Change Managers, and Team Members—and diverse industries to work together to master the art and science of Strategy Execution.

Fueled by my frustration of the lack of progress in strategy execution over the past 25 years, I founded The Strategy eXecution Forum (StrategyXF) to help organizations forge a new path. The community is key, as the reality is that no single person or function has the expertise and experience in all aspects of strategy execution processes and tools, as the discipline is complex and spans varying best practice capabilities utilized by different functions and teams.

At StratgeyXF we firmly believe that to master strategy execution, organizations must integrate 5 critical capabilities - strategic portfolio management, business and enterprise architecture, project execution, and change management - into a cohesive operating model that unites all functions and teams needed to effectively orchestrate strategic initiatives across the enterprise.

StrategyXF’s mission is to enable these practitioners to collaborate, share insights, and ultimately work together to define and socialize proven approaches for integrating all strategy execution processes to effectively connect disparate teams and drive business performance. We know that one-size-fits-all strategy execution methodologies do not work. Through the community, our objective is to identify different best practice approaches to address the 10 key Strategy Execution principles included in the SXframework, to help companies personalize operating model best suited to their idiosyncrasies and culture.

It takes a village! Together we can quickly learn from one and other and truly optimize and advance Strategy Execution capabilities across different industries to maximize business outcomes

Join StrategyXF Today! 

Be part of a movement to master strategy execution. Collaborate with peers, access our insighful resources (Assessments, Blog Posts, Podcasts, Guides etc.), engage in forums, form company PODs and regional / industry groups, or contribute to the SXframework to co-create impactful solutions. Learn more at www.strategyxf.com and join the community to help shape the future of strategy execution!