Improving Strategy Implementation : Case: Sales department, the Sport Institute of Finland

The main goal is to study how strategy was implemented to the sales department of Vierumäki, and how this process could be improved. Objectives were to find out if the de-partment’s managers possess enough information and resources to implement strategy and if the head of the organization supports them in their work. In addition, the research seeks to find answers to what the level of understanding of strategy is among the employees of the sales department, and how the organization could enhance this understanding. The theory part of the study includes; strategy work and strategy process, strategy implemen-tation and the Balanced Scorecard. The main focus of is on strategy implementation and more precisely on the importance of middle managers, communication, and managing strate-gic change during implementation. The study introduces the Balanced Scorecard as a tool for strategy implementation. The research is conducted as a single case study by using multimethod qualitative as a methodological choice. The data was gathered by interviewing face-to-face a director from the head of Vierumäki, and two managers of the sales department. In addition, an email in-terview was sent to the employees of the sales department. As secondary data the study used different literature sources, internet articles, reports and webpages, as well as, organizational documents. The findings suggested that the Balanced Scorecard is an effective tool to address the issues of strategy implementation which refers to the low skill levels of middle managers, ineffective communication, organizational resistance to change and the lack of coordinated strategic control systems. In conclusion the study suggests that Vierumäki’s sales department would benefit from Bal-anced Scorecard – tool, which can create more homogeneous working environment resulting in achieving strategic goals. Also the quality in personal development discussions between employees and managers would increase from more detailed evaluation of success in per-sonal goals supporting the overall strategy of the organization. The research suggests creating individual scorecards for each employee in the sales department and to include them in the personal development discussions