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.