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Strategy Development > Justification & Set Up > Tasks

Clarifying the issues

The complex and cross-cutting nature of strategy projects mean that at the outset it is important to develop a clear articulation of the issue to be addressed, and agree this with all key stakeholders. This will help to define the scope of the project, identify any fixed boundaries that are not open to review and set expectations for its outputs.

This exercise should go further than defining the overall issue to be addressed by breaking it down in a logical way to highlight all the sub-issues. A powerful tool for structuring the issue in this way is an issue tree which generates a logical family-tree style hierarchy of issues and sub-issues.

Mapping out the entire 'issue space' in this way is useful for a number of reasons:

• it generates a detailed understanding of the relevant issues
• it helps to identify the true root causes of an issue
• it provides a focus for initial discussions with stakeholders to understand their view points
• it highlights potential modules of work, or workstreams, for the project
• it provides a structure and framework for subsequent data gathering and analysis.

Clarifying the issues at this early stage will also help the team to stay focused, help each member to know how their work fits into the whole, and act as a reference later in the project to check that the team has achieved what it set out to achieve.

Useful links:

> issue trees