Saturday, October 9, 2021

Initiatingplanningwitharchitecture

Good planning is goal-directed, purposeful, and intelligent, and all intelligent activities are planned to reach clearly-defined goals.

With the faster pace of changes and continuous disruptions, organizational planning and forecasting become challenging, and planning fallacy turns to be a business reality. Forward-thinking companies need to keep planning and improving.

 Architecture contains the organizational context and is strategic in that it gives direction to the business planning and transformation. The architecture-based planning process is a continuous cycle and a part of the management process itself. And then, the responsibility of the management is to make a seamless alignment of planning and implementation.

Long-term strategic planning: Long-term planning is a must-do “thing” in uncertain times to adapt to a dynamic change environment proactively, help the business stay focused, lead to better decisions, and manage risks effectively. Oftentimes business management “keeps the lights on,” focusing on tactical issues, but “getting lost” of the big picture for the long run. Uncertainty is a new normal. When there are a couple of big "it depends on..." issues, businesses benefit a lot from a strategic scenario mapping exercise that clarifies the different future scenarios they might be facing. The architecture is a useful tool for a dynamic and iterative long term strategic planning process that fine tune the internal and external business influence factors, helping to constantly question if the vision and strategic direction are being chosen smoothly, identify some of the uncontrollable elements in the business environment and make a few “educated guesses” as to the impacts of these and emerging elements into the future state in the ever-changing world with increasing paces.

In fact, the degree of planning has a positive correlation with the degree of uncertainty and unpredictability. If the actual planning is spot on, leverage an architecture as a facilitation tool to initiate cross-domain communications: listen to your employees or customers, listen to the market, listen to the competition, be realistic, believe in strategic planning, more to the point is to make sure everybody else believes on the plan too, conduct organizational level briefing and choose the most suitable and acceptable approach to reach the desired destination. An effective architecture framework also helps the corporate leaders to gain a systematic understanding of how relationships, ecosystems, market dynamics, interconnectivity, and orchestrate the organizational interrelationship between people and process for overseeing clearly-defined strategic goals of organizations,

Budget planning: Planning a strategy without its budget, or revising a budget without considering the impact on the strategy are both ineffective, causing confusion and stagnation. In reality, the budgeting process in many organizations still gets stuck in the past, the management thinks their company’s budget process isn’t consistent with what the management is planning to drive significant business transformation. The role of the budgeting is to implement and at the same time to supervise the plan not to exceed its items.

An essential question for leaders is whether their budgeting matches the level of change or innovation they expect by improving capital flow, while keeping total spending mostly flat. An architecture is an important tool for the management to map organizational capability and capacity to strategic goals, build a governance model that’s participative, proactive, and progressive to enhance agility, flexibility. Also, do benchmarking as comparisons, creating credibility that will emphasize that budget requests are reasonable.

Capacity planning: Capacity planning needs to be part of the corporate initiatives around continuous improvement and strategic implementation. The key to successful capacity planning is to know what you are doing, being transparent, and clear leadership at all levels and governance so everyone knows what they are to execute on. By applying architecture and a planning tool, capacity planning allows for a transparent view from across the organization that should help level the playing field, assign resources, time, and talent efficiently and improve the overall success rate of change. Any minute saved fixing issues will enable you to spend another minute preventing one and supporting business initiatives. Scientific capacity planning ensures the business resources/talent management are in line with the corporate direction to achieve the well-defined business goals.

Methodologically, to make capacity planning effective and practical, it is important to use architecture tools to get the bigger picture, take a deep look at the underlying business functions and processes, as well as take a wider look around at what’s going on inside and outside the organization and how it might affect the organization and identify opportunities and threats accordingly. Create liaison and business partnership, figure out what the business needs, share unique business insight as to what capacity can provide, retool management to model powerful collaboration. So the management can make related decisions about the ideal workload, and be clear on what, who, when, and how to achieve business goals based on the financial value and available resources, to maximize business value.

Good planning is goal-directed, purposeful, and intelligent, and all intelligent activities are planned to reach clearly-defined goals. It is important to get you off the ground and running, also ensure that there is sufficient time to prepare the stakeholders for the changes on the way. An architecture is an effective communication tool that enables strategic alignment, for advising, monitoring, deliberating, and sustaining a balance of diversified viewpoints, science and art, analysis and synthesis, democracy and unification; individualism and teamwork, and riding the tide of business transformation.

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