Wednesday, March 22, 2023

Initiatives

It’s always important to keep optimizing business management disciplines for striking the right balance of short term gain and long term perspective, increasing value generation and building business advantage.

The organization gets stagnated because the business systems are no longer able to accommodate changing needs or are too fragile to run at the right speed. There are quite a few pitfalls for managing business initiatives smoothly with on-time, on-budget, and on value delivery. 

It’s critical to keep monitoring the overall health of the organizational management, fine-tune the business processes and systems to ensure both business system effectiveness and efficiency in order to achieve strategic agility and operational excellence.

On-schedule:
Organizations have limited resources, time, and talent, for every meaningful business initiative, there are two outline points: the client expectations and the company strategy. It’s important to keep a proper balance between the different constraints (schedule, scope, budget). The managers have to balance between those points and find a way to conciliate the objectives, improve return on investment.

The schedule is the dependent variable. The schedule is the result of budget constraints, technical constraints, or the interdependence between tasks. The schedule is determined by the scope and allocated resources. It's not an easy task to keep business initiatives on schedules as there are lots of emerging issues and many distractions. The schedule can't be arbitrarily determined in advance. But if the managers have a total support of his or her hierarchy. The scope and the resources allocated are independent variables, and can be changed by sponsors. So the business initiatives can be managed on schedule to produce tangible results.

On-budget: More and more of the budget is being allocated to the departmental heads and that they are being given the option to spend this money at their own discretion. From a business initiative management perspective, the role of the budget is to implement and at the same time to supervise the plan not to exceed its items. Otherwise, there will be some deficit somewhere.

You need to be carefully managing the budget. The budgeting should also follow the general business governance principles. Listen to people involved, find right people cross-function with deep communication. Identify suspected key indicators, to find space that can be improved. follow the “SMART” measure rule, attempt improvement, track, analyze, learn, and repeat.

On value: With rapid changes and fierce competition, it is important to shorten its product/services delivery cycle for creating value which the business initiative was promised to deliver. In practice, bureaucratic thinking generates negative energy which stops organizations from moving forward. It is about fear of failure; fear of getting out of old habits or getting out of the comfort zone, etc. People need time to assimilate change and work through the issues to implement business initiative with multifaceted business value generation.

There are customer value, economical value, employee value, and cultural value, etc.The true value of business initiatives is created at the intersection of many management disciplines, to develop vision and strategy, to design and deliver quality products and services. Business management needs to properly understand all elements of value that are translated to the organization, and how all the pieces and parts of the organization are ultimately impacted,

While some organizations may be excellent in the execution of business initiatives management, they may not have a mature portfolio management process in place, which causes issues with the strategy alignment of business programs and portfolios. It’s always important to keep optimizing business management disciplines for striking the right balance of short term gain and long term perspective, increasing value generation and building business advantage.

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