Initiatives

It’s important to keep eyes on what matters, identify what generates the most value for the company and express that in strategic objectives.

Any initiative should have a business objective associated with it. The management needs to check how the business initiative differentiates the organization from its major competitors. There are strategic initiatives and tactical initiatives; functional initiatives and cross boundary initiatives, local initiative or global initiative; quick win or long term focused initiatives, identifying what generates the most value for the company and expressing that in strategic objectives helps managers keep their eyes on what matters: Can the business initiative differentiates the organization from its competitors? Are they competing for best quality, cost advantage or efficient value chain? Are the initiatives able to improve employee/customer loyalty and enhance organizational reputation?

It’s important to understand leadership/employee factors in strategic business initiatives: Senior leaders need to be fluent in strategic thinking and must participate in creating and shaping a company's vision, aligning proposed business initiatives with organizational strategic goals, provide the description and articulate the reason for starting an initiative. To focus on the value proposition, do a strategic mapping, create a situation where the main strategic initiatives are commonly understood cross-functionally on the leadership team. Learn to cancel bad initiatives without creating sufficient value, and move on.

As people all have different strengths and capacities, professionals with a fitting mindset, expertise and integrity, can take a new adventure of business initiatives, and become accountable to produce good enough results. People factor matter; even if the intention is decent; the attitude is good, the outcome is not always so great, and sometimes the opposite is true. People with the right talent need to be put in the right position, to think, understand, learn and work together to lead better decisions and better performance. By having an empowered workforce that is able to respond to changing conditions, improving initiative effectiveness can truly make a business nimble and thus, transform the business from good to great!

It’s critical to understand its customer needs, have a clear understanding of how customer-centric initiatives enhance the business model and extend profitability: High performance companies become part of the conversation to determine what's important and needs changing vs. what's anecdotal, to run a customer-centric organization. "understanding your clients," "putting yourself in their shoes," "going above expectations," etc, are all the mantras to increase customer-centricity.

Having a strong sense of how to develop customer-centric initiatives within the business means to build an integral and unique set of business capabilities to delight customers. That means building the integral solutions to combine technology and business tactics. Using a more inductive approach as to what the customer wants to accomplish "next," and achieve multifaceted business value with customer delight.

It’s great to always take process improvement as a journey, not a one-time initiative, to build competitive advantage: Processes underpin business capabilities which enable strategy implementation. Organizations become over-complex, potential to simplify a complex process is a consideration, but process complexity is usually not a high consideration in deciding which processes to improve. Selecting a process to improve should be based on the business goals and priority, automation, complexity, etc, are also considered factors.

Processes today need to shift from static to dynamic; event-driven to goal driven and people centric. You may perhaps consider the emergent process, which is inherently "complex" due to their collaborative, knowledge-intensive nature. Consider the level of automation possible for the business process initiatives. Not all activities within a process can be automated but automation certainly makes the process more repeatable and predictable.

The very goal of business initiative management is to set the right priority, improve overall organizational effectiveness and agility. It’s important to keep eyes on what matters, identify what generates the most value for the company and express that in strategic objectives, set the right priority, analyze potential pitfalls, align key success factors of the business, streamline business resources, process, capability, capacity. Business leaders and professionals need to keep updating knowledge, capture organizational foresight to evolving emerging trends for taking new strategic initiatives, and optimize the overall business initiative portfolio quality.

Posted in: Execution,Strategy