Initiatives

Business initiative management should become enhancements to produce quality products, services, and generate high performance results coherently.

With rapid change and overwhelming growth of information, 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. Senior business management needs to be fluent in strategic thinking and participate in shaping a company's vision, aligning proposed business initiatives with organizational strategic goals, articulating the reason for starting an initiative, in order to build a solid business initiative portfolio for developing differentiated competency, accelerating business performance effectively.

Initiative differentiates the organization from its major competitors: Organizations have limited resources, time, and talent, the management needs to check how the business initiative differentiates the organization from its major competitors. Are they competing for best quality, cost advantage or efficient value chain? Can the products/services produced do what they promise? Senior executives should say no to many of the initiatives and just choose a few where they will put most of the resources, people to implement smoothly.

Differentiation makes the business stand out by allowing the organization to close resource bottlenecks and develop unique business competencies. The real challenge is to understand your priorities, and know where and how you can and should take initiatives to leverage available resources, focus on creating business advantage. It’s important to establish a cross-functional team to involve multifaceted management, plan and implement a balanced portfolio in a structural way.

Initiative restores the organization to competitive parity by reversing erosion in people-centricity: Organizations are always on, inter-dependent and hyper-connected, people are always the most important asset in any organization. It’s important to understand customers’ needs, have a clear understanding of how customer-centric initiatives enhance the business model and extend profitability. Customer Experience is the most potent differentiating factor in a business that looks to embrace business greatness. Customer needs and desires should be researched. A customer doesn't become loyal, just by buying. They become loyal when they have experienced something out of the ordinary.

So being people-centric presents some business strategy challenges such as increased need for product flexibility, understanding clients, "putting yourself in their shoes, "going above expectations. The digital workplace is all about people-centricity, empathy, innovation, agility. Employee experience can be improved by empowering them with advanced platforms and tools, encouraging self-discovery and autonomy.

Initiative ensures the organization’s compliance with regulatory requirements, etc: Following a set of rules and regulations to not only keep the lights on, but also set the constraints to enable changes are crucial for business long term survival. Be aware that compliance is not just about the letter of the law/regulation, but also very much about the spirit of the law/regulation. Once you've taken care of compliance, governance seems to flow out rather easily. Fine-tune a common process to improve real-time accountability and transparency across regulatory areas with a common system of practices.

Now even more than in the past, as the world has become significantly ‘smaller’ due to the blurred industrial territories. Compliance at the strategic level, requires a forward-looking strategic perspective to deal with unprecedented uncertainty and ambiguity; companies that do not recognize this are blindfolding to a great extent. Compliance related initiatives are crucial to ensure organizational requirement compliance to improve organizational effectiveness and maturity.

Business senior management take an oversight of business initiative management, articulating and aligning them with Vision-Strategy-Structure-People & Processes and Assets. If stakeholder values and issues are well aligned and managed, business initiative management should become enhancements to produce quality products, services, and generate high performance results coherently.

Posted in: Execution,Strategy