Initiatives

Business leaders must be willing to present courage, intelligence, and determination required to pull resources & people together, continually push the initiative forward to achieve the desired goals successfully.

Upon increasing paces of changes, the reality is that there are a lot of things that can go wrong and it is not always easy to identify what is important. Thus, business management needs to keep their eyes open; their vision high, and continue to explore emerging opportunities and risks accordingly.

A healthy business initiative portfolio expands into the hidden dimension of business prosperity by building differentiated capabilities, designing new business models, and investigating untaken paths for accelerating growth and improving business long term competency.

The size and mix of the business initiative portfolio depend on the business situation, strategic objectives and severity of external challenges or changes: Business processes underpin capabilities. Business process design is logically describing a solution about how it is or will be done - refresh these core business processes to make sure the changes are not only predicted but also fully prepared. The point is that the organizations should spend time on optimizing processes, improving business engagement and sponsorship, enhancing people-centricity and delivering award-winning high performance.

The holistic perspective is critical to business process management improvement: Often, the people who work in the business process are unaware of all the issues and problems. The top management’s oversight is crucial for improving effectiveness of business initiatives by clarifying: How does the initiative build business processes that differentiate the organization from its major competitors? Is it event-driven or goal-driven? How to build intelligent processes, and improve process intelligence? There are all sorts of process intelligence which implies information & feedback, programmability, governance incorporated in these processes to make it smart enough. Such a smart process needs to have dynamic aspects to it and it is rigorous for improving business agility.

Good program management is essential for successful strategy execution: The best strategy in the world is only as good as the outcomes it produces. It's the aligned programs that produce the outcomes. It is the intermediate layer of program management that is focused on the delivery of business benefits through the identifying interdependence of a series of interrelated business initiatives. When senior management allows ineffective program management practices to become the norm, people at all levels often become complacent and ineffective. Effective program management needs to make sure that enough resources are available to take business initiatives, talented professionals are put in the right positions, the processes are goal driven, and flexible, to manage the interdependencies of the business initiatives cost-efficiently.

Organizations should strive to explore the "best practices" throughout their organization: Every organization should strive to explore the "best practices" throughout their organization. With effective tools or methodologies, the best practice can be used wisely and with the expertise to really add value. Not every company uses every best practice. One size doesn't fit all. The key is context. If the context is different, it is worth understanding how that difference could impact the so-called best practice. Perhaps it is a better approach to strive for using good practice, good enough for the specific situation and challenges that are faced and that actually requires different priorities or approaches as compared to others.

It takes greater transparency, trust, cross-functional collaboration, optimized process, expectation management, sponsorship from C-Level peers and buy-in from staff, to improve business initiative success rate at a strategic level. Improving the effectiveness of portfolio management is to ensure that the management is doing the right things by setting guidelines to provide greater clarification of vision, mission, strategy, at a more detailed level. Business leaders must be willing to present the courage, intelligence, and determination required to pull resources & people together, continually push the initiative forward to achieve the desired goals successfully.

Posted in: Information/Data Management