It takes a collaborative attitude, a systematic approach and strong management discipline to discuss and manage a variety of constraints, and investigate the different paths for unlocking business performance.
An organization as a system loses energy until it reaches the tipping point. It’s important to make an objective assessment of the business readiness carefully, leverage the digital vision to pull through silos, tensions, or constraints and reimagine the future of business boldly.
Strategy frames effective constraints which are not only a facilitator but a requirement to value-driven activities: Many companies are running in the mix of old and new; the different divisions within an organization have different focus or speeds, often there are frictions existing between underlying functions, structures, or overall strategy management practices. There are constraints in an organization that seems to hold the business back from a holistic strategy. Indeed, such constraints may become the very reasons why organizations need to craft their strategy. The strategy as an effective constraint is in getting all of the business systems or subsystems up to a current condition to snap into an enterprise strategy.
Strategy is the bridge between the current state of the business and the future state of the business. Organizations today are like the organic system that keeps evolving. In reality though, given the silo-based structure, the traditional management approach which is based on linear thinking - thinking of the business as a mechanical system, so their strategy is perhaps more short term driven, to keep the lights on for ensuring the business stability, without doing enough for driving transformative change. Business architecture can be a useful tool, having the tough axis which describes strategic “constraint,” allowing the management to describe a target state and conform change in the enterprise towards the aspirational end-state, while at the same time addressing complexity and optimizing business step-wisely.
The constraints in business requirements prioritization: Business competency underpins strategy execution. Business portfolio management underpins corporate competency. Business requirements across the organizational functions need to be gathered, discussed with executives or teams, and managed effectively in order to set the right priority and use resources scientifically, focusing on those requirements whose improvement has the most benefit to the business. The transparent strategic mapping allows people at a different level of the organizational hierarchy understanding business goals and objectives, identify how to best characterize the multifaceted business value through portfolio management, as well as define the suitable measurement to properly assess business performance from outside-in business’s perspective.
Practically, the constraints in requirements prioritization often have more to do with the fact that the backlog serves multiple "masters." Where the values differ, let them negotiate and agree upon something, and if required things escalate up their lines of management. Teamwork, negotiation, and collaboration matter. Assume any inputs are incomplete from a holistic perspective and are filtered from the silo's functional view. Keep the stakeholders focused on those requirements and relationships, while the requirements manager never loses sight of all requirements and relationships. The reiteration of the requirements development process is essential to arriving at the agreement of "real" requirements to keep the business initiative moving forward.
People set constraints that limit them from unleashing their full potential: The individual’s “thinking box" is a mental construct made up of personal and environmental components that one operates within. People are constrained by such a little thinking box with which they are familiar with or just follow other people’s explanation without thinking further or digging deeper. To dig into the root cause of change inertia, many people are used to living in familiar territory, operating with an incomplete and relatively small view of the world due to the scarcity of information and static setting in the industrial age. They are used to applying conventional wisdom to problem-solving based on a very limited thinking they formed quite a long time ago, that perhaps only fixes symptoms, but causes more problems later on.
Great things don't happen inside your comfort zone; typically, it's associated with convention within context. Breaking down conventional thinking constraints is one of the significant steps in driving transformative change, cognitively, sociologically, technologically, etc. Deep thinking occurs when you look for in-depth understanding, cause-effect reasoning in order to discover a way to contribute something of unique value. That could be an expression of your understanding based on your review of experience and perception; it could come through deep observation via seeing beyond obvious or looking around the corner, in order to dig into the root cause of the problems or set good policies to encourage progressive changes.
Organizations are constantly morphing under pressure from the waves of creative destruction that keep business in innovation mode. Re-imagining the future of business is exciting, but it takes a collaborative attitude, a systematic approach and strong management discipline to discuss and manage a variety of constraints, build capability and capacity of the corporation and investigate the different paths for unlocking business performance.
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