Initiatives

There are some levels of discomfort and interdisciplinary transcendence, to improve the overall success rate of goal-driven business initiatives.

Given the “VUCA” normality of the business and given the challenges of ever-evolving dynamic ecosystems, organizations today are usually dynamic and have a lot of moving parts, multithreaded business practices. Organizations nowadays are complex, because a particular business initiative in the organization could impact multiple capability increments.

It’s always important to predict or estimate that the investment is directed at certain goals and maximize return on investment. The initiative management should be proactive, situate the organization within a growing and highly profitable product market niche, and build differentiated business competency.

It’s critical to clarify the vision, identify the gap and be able to acquire various types of information: Every organization has a purpose, to generate customers and help them solve a certain set of problems. What is it you want to achieve? Begins with an acceptance you do not know enough to achieve your purpose; know what questions to ask to close the knowledge gap, to realize positive outcomes.

Besides a clarified vision, abstract level of guidelines, comprehensive planning needs to get to the level of specifically achievable goals. It’s also important to predict the potential pitfalls on the way such as: Unclear goal with too many attached variables; mismatch in requirements from roles and expertise of people; lack of differentiated competencies; ignoring the external environment or business ecosystem affecting the business, etc

“Not go it alone,” identify stakeholders; create an initiative, implement it, and size deliverables: Every business initiative intends to solve certain problems. That could be macro problems which directly impact on the business strategy or that could also be the micro problem which impacts the business’s bottom line for surviving. To think critically and take initiatives proactively, perhaps more often than not, it involves collective insight and collaborative work.

It’s important to refine information to capture the business insight of growth opportunities or customer insight; continue to see the importance of dealing with blind spots and overcoming challenges. Once you have collected feedback and identified the impact on various stakeholders, you need to ask how you can optimize the process, or how you can execute the rollout so that the positives are enhanced and the negatives are reduced. Different stakeholders such as peers, subordinates, co-workers, clients, and vendors all have their various observations and different roles to play. Their respective viewpoints can indicate useful areas for further exploration and confirmation.

Look for allies within the key business arenas, preferably ones logical to the cause and who have the power in implementation: In organizations, there are all sorts of associations: employee engagement, customer interaction, vendor collaboration, stakeholder communication and relationships, etc. The intensity of one’s association, engagement, and commitment in an organization depends on their perception of the purpose of that organization. For the large scale business initiatives, you will treat the association as a calling - opportunity to serve others and will be passionately engaged in generating multidimensional business value. Association connects with business purpose, creates synergies in the organization and its external environment, and how this affects the future of the organization.

Organization's ability to refine, redesign, realign, reprioritize strategies during implementation phase directly impacts the effectiveness of business initiative management. It is important that business management has objectivity and humility to realize that their hard processes are outdated or soft elements such as culture are ineffective. Seamless alignment and integration will help to determine the appropriate dynamic aspects and enable the business management to integrate the key elements appropriately into cohesive business capabilities for enabling business initiative implementation.

Quality information and logical scenarios are needed to achieve high performance from business initiative management. It can be adjusted to meet the business priority, and be effective with the little down curve; there are some levels of discomfort and interdisciplinary transcendence, to improve the overall success rate of goal-driven business initiatives. Positive attitude, vision, great preparation collaboration, perseverance and the ability to work hard are all crucial factors to lead in business initiative success and unlock organizational performance.

Posted in: Enterprise Capability,Execution,Systems Wisdom