Initiatives

It’s important to optimize business management capability and capacity, harness innovation, unlock business performance and unleash collective potential consistently.

Organizations today are inundated with the sea of information, overwhelmed with too many initiatives, and overloaded with operation and short term business concerns.

Every business initiative is to solve a certain problem; think big, start small; well define business goals, then, diagnose the current problems holistically. You can't do everything; so which business initiatives will you take? You have to determine why you are doing it. What strategic goals and objectives are you trying to reach?

Rate importance of business initiatives: To survive in the dynamic business circumstances, business management needs to do more planning and prioritization, and align business portfolio management with strategic goals and objectives, and improve organizational transparency. It's critical to implement business initiatives steadily by optimizing the value of information while minimizing risks, preventing risks effectively, and shaping high mature digital organizations step-wisely.

When circumstances change, you are devising the plan, adjusting the initiatives, all of which needs to be relevant but also general to deal with the 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. It’s important to make extensive observations, try to understand how those parts are connected. When a new initiative comes up, the senior stakeholders must be able to rate its importance. Knowledge professionals need further ability to be innovative and intelligent, think out of the box, and solve problems with alternative solutions.

Handle sequence & consequence in a rational way: Running a business with progressive change is fundamentally about how to apply logic to solve problems, implement ideas, and guild teams to make things happen timely. To keep employees and teams focused on the most important things, handle sequence & consequence of change initiatives, enforce logic, more often nonlinearly, to produce business results smoothly.

The management needs to predict which consequences can be created through action steps of strategic implementation, and how to make proper adjustments in its external environment, and how this affects the future of the organization. The real challenge is to understand the priorities of your company, and know where and how you can and should improve to amplify its effect. The dynamic sequence-consequence cycle involves the continual attention to current changes in the organization.

Business management needs to calculate cost/benefit for each of their business solution alternatives: Many organizations have little insight into their cost structures and who is consuming the assets. It's important to generate business cases and look for investments to be justified and governed on the basis of benefit delivery, return on investment and contribution to innovation. Highly effective organizations keep optimizing the organizational cost significantly to better compete in a global marketplace. The challenge is to have visibility and traceability between business costs and the assets consuming those costs. Highly effective organizations keep optimizing the organizational cost significantly to better compete in a global marketplace.

Balanced score cards have their place, but you need to combine with traditional estimation on cost/benefit and to add the third dimension which connects the initiatives to the strategies they contribute to and use pairwise comparison to give you a view on how they contribute. The management estimates the time and cost for relevant activities that they can think of, leverage appropriate technologies to generate invaluable insights, making predictions on how much profit the business will make, as well as how to strike the right balance of short term gain and long term perspective.

We shall realize we can change, whether forced by circumstances or our own initiatives. Change happens whether we want it or not..So do not limit the success factor for a change or transformation to any particular aspect, nor accept the pure success or pure failure assumption. The dimension of diversity is indeed needed to provide more teeth and speed to the business initiative in the rapidly changing times. It’s important to optimize business management capability and capacity, harness innovation, unlock business performance and unleash collective potential consistently.

Posted in: IT Finance,Performance Master,Problem Solving,Project Management