Challenges of strategy implementation at the Nairobi county government
Abstract
Strategy implementation involves allocation of sufficient resources financial, personnel,
time, and establishing a chain of command or organizational structure. It involves
assigning responsibility of specific tasks or processes to specific individuals or groups. It
also involves managing the process. Many organizations are able to generate innovative
strategic plans, but few are able to successfully implement these plans. Some researchers
note that organizations fail to implement up to 70% of their strategic initiatives. This
study mainly focused on a different context and concept from what the current study
seeks to cover. Given the importance of strategy implementation, this study sought to fill
the gap by seeking answers to the following research question: the challenges facing
strategy implementation at the Nairobi County Government? That is the knowledge gap
that the study sought to fill. The objective of the study was to establish the challenges of
strategy implementation at the Nairobi County Government. The research adopted a
descriptive cross-sectional research design, which is used when the problem has been
defined specifically and where the research has certain issue to be described by the
respondents about the problem. The study employed a face to face interview as a primary
data collection method. An interview guide was employed as the sole research instrument.
Content analysis enables researchers to sift through large volumes of data with relative
ease in a systematic fashion. Qualitative content analysis does not produce counts and
statistical significance. It uncovers patterns, themes, and categories important to a social
reality. The study found that level of management skills influences the strategy
implementation to great extent. It established that innovativeness is a key success factor
in strategy implementation. The study also found organizational structure influences
strategy implementation in the organisation. This was through bureaucratic bottlenecks,
differentiated roles that lead to specialization, number of reporting lines, harmony of
reporting lines and employee placement. It also revealed that the challenges faced during
strategy implementation were lack of support from the top management , slow budget
approval, lack of clear individual role, lack of alignment with the organization strategic
plan, lack of employee involvement, poor staffing level, ineffective communication
during strategy implementation and lack of coordination of activities during strategy
implementation. It found that employee did not understand what the County Government
strives to achieve, politics affected strategy implementation in Nairobi county
Government and transition affect strategy implementation. The finding of this study will
be of great importance to policy makers as it will help them to come up with factors that
delays strategy implementation and those which will hinder their implementation
altogether. When such factors are identified, strategies will then be formulated to curb the
situation. Strategies that face implementation problems are in most cases those that will
give a company the required competitive edge. This implies that there is direct
relationship between strategy implementation and the competitiveness of an organisation.
Citation
Master of Business AdministrationPublisher
University of Nairobi