Initiatives

Often, those business initiatives at the strategic level are not isolated, but require a holistic management approach.

Nowadays organizations are overwhelmed with abundant information, rapid change, overloaded business initiatives. There are tactical initiatives and strategic initiatives, quick win or long run 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 and make the right choice to bring better outcome.

Only initiatives that support the value achievement should be implemented. How to set the right principles, develop the next practices, gain lessons learned to improve business initiative management effectiveness and produce high performance results with consistency?

Initiatives need to have clearly defined goals, scope, or requirements: The business leaders at the top should sponsor the initiative, and they are skilled at defining the business scopes, requirements in a business language describing targets, customer needs, competitor offers, current SWOT and all identified opportunities & risks. They are the key to the success readiness checklist. State success factors so that all the stakeholders understand the implications and get them to agree and sign it; let them know the calculated effort and ensure everyone understands the clearly defined goals, scopes, requirements.

From top down and bottom up, people doing the work have to show the continuing value. The challenge of business initiative success include: The scope (cross-functional boundary), the status (uncertainty, unclear goal etc), the talent (mindset, skillet, toolset), the limited resources, other barriers. Business generalists and specialists need to work collaboratively, define a tight implementation framework, get the best of breed from all levels of colleagues across the company assigned to the implementation, define terms of reference, and take “institutionalization method” to improve business portfolio management effectiveness.

It’s important to build a cohesive knowledge base, remove cultural, organizational, and systemic obstacles: It means that teams need to have the necessary, well-blended talent or proficient knowledge to deliver results successfully. The business management should think holistically, from an outside-in view, evaluate potential impact regarding scope, culture, or expected duration of the business initiatives. In reality, people are usually the weakest link in business management. As they are often pulled in and taken out on an ad-hoc basis. The actual team is piecemealed together with little thought given the actual development cycles. All of which increases friction, causing change inertia, ineffectiveness and inefficiency.

Business executives today need to keep in touch with organizational partners, customers and varying stakeholders based on people-centricity principles. Understanding that everyone plays a “piece of the pie,” giving everyone a voice in how they can take initiatives to make influences. Tapping diversity to fuel creative energy is about shaping a high performance team and facilitating cohesive team effort by having people who can complement each other’s viewpoint, broaden the knowledge base and deepen the understanding of varying issues to bring fresh ideas, bring higher-than-expected results.

Initiatives’ scope and requirements are allowed to fluctuate as they progresses, change should be handled proactively: Change is part of reality. There's nothing to be done about an uncontrollable situation although the management can truly have a humble attitude to collect feedback, and do enough homework for planning, investing, and adjusting timely. Sometimes, things get worse when initiatives are designed in the vacuums of silo, not well communicated across business functions. Feedback management could be part of the solution or problem depending on how you make improvements. Assuming any inputs are incomplete from a holistic perspective and are filtered from the silo's functional view, the reiteration of the requirements development process is essential to arriving at the "real" requirement management.

Understand emerging business trends; understand customers’ needs & wants; understand employees’ inner drive. Talk to the people who are using or will be using the proposed solution. Talk as much to the people that will benefit from the new requirement as those who will feel pain from not meeting the new requirement. If the person at the top wants the initiative to happen and be successful, they should enforce an iterative planning-implementation cycle, it is only the potential value they see in the initiative that will "seal the deal." Overall, good anticipation in planning is key for a smoother implementation, while regular updates and adjustments will enhance your chances of success.

Every business initiative is to solve problems large or small. High-impactful business initiatives should be viewed as an "opportunity" for solving crucial problems or the chains of problems effectively. Often, those business initiatives at the strategic level are not isolated, but require a holistic management approach, embrace emerging business properties, make transformative change from influencing people’s mindset to driving desired attitude and behaviors. Usually, the more stakeholders can impact business initiatives seriously, the better chance the initiatives will achieve or exceed the business expectations.

Posted in: Agile,Digital Agility,Digitalization,Project Management