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Tag: Planning

Seven Candid Strategic Questions that Every Business Leader Should Ask

Good questions are the key to successful planning and decision making. Throughout the business planning process we must consider strategic questions to help us understand the current situation, focus areas and our vision for the future. Strategic planning is an intensive process and should be a team effort – it should not be done in isolation.

A good place to start in the planning process is to focus on ‘what’ questions. What questions are extremely powerful tools for thinking about your business / personal strategy, goals and objectives. The key is to know which questions to ask and to be willing to take a candid look at your business.

Here are seven candid “what” questions that every business leader should ask:

What are the overall strengths and weaknesses of your business?

Strengths and weaknesses exist in all organizations and should include considerations for people, resources, culture, work processes, tools, supply chain, financial situation, etc. The list goes on and on. The important thing here is to start the process by first looking at your organization and its resources.

What are the overall opportunities and threats to your business?

Focus here on your external world, the things you cannot control but must be aware of. Some items could include a market shift, retirement and succession, competitive movement and changes, the global business climate (local, national or international), obstacles or climate and weather effects. We often miss the opportunity to do environmental scanning. Look outside your office to truly understand the opportunities and threats to your organization.

What political, economic, social and technological conditions impact your business?

What’s happening in your local business scene (economics)? Is there a product or service that people want or need to buy? Is technology impacting your team and their need for training? What important social change will impact the business?

Are you developing leaders for tomorrow? Every answer should lead to another question. Dig deep, exhaust yourself and find people to help you through the process.

What do you want to achieve, protect, avoid and eliminate?

This question contains all the elements of risk planning. There are always things we want to achieve, protect, avoid and eliminate on a personal, team or organizational basis. What are they? Identify as many as possible and make a list.

Examples vary but could include increased sales, keeping an established portfolio, avoiding trouble or accidents, establishing an employee health program or helping people drop a few pounds. The point here is that whatever is identified must be relevant to your business and its challenges.

What are the key challenges you face today, tomorrow and in the distant future?

We’re in an era where we must be predictive and adaptive business leaders and professionals. Strategic planning is about time frames with past, present and future considerations. Establish what your work world should look like with time frames. Planning used to focus on 3 to 5 year cycles. That has changed. Now we must keep our eye on short-term road trips with long term implications.

Where are we and how did we get here?

This question is a pure honesty question. It is used to establish your present situation and to help you accept complete responsibility and accountability for it. No blame-storming allowed. Outside forces might have contributed, but at some point decisions were made to set your direction. As a business leader, you were either active or reactive and there were consequences. Capture it, leverage it and be prepared to let it go.

What key initiatives are going to be placed on the strategic agenda of your business? Why?

At some point you need to focus and make key decisions that will make a difference in your business. Building your strategic agenda is a different type of challenge and may require another approach. This may take ‘why’ questions, questions that focus on benefits and value. Before adding anything to your strategic agenda you must first clearly establish the benefits and values of those items.

Being honest about your business, the organization and its people is a challenge. When strategic planning it’s important to remove yourself from the natural tendency of coming up with solutions. Establishing solutions is the action part of planning. Consider engaging an expert strategic facilitator to help. Remember that you don’t plan to fail, you fail to plan and planning requires asking the right questions.

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Initiating ITIL Implementation in a Small Organization

Understanding the need for improving the process and what exactly the organization is trying to address is very important before we plan to apply any framework to an existing system. ITIL address many critical issues faced by any IT industry (small/large). Let us consider the below aspects,

  1. Service downtime that the business tolerate
  2. SLA /acceptable recovery time
  3. Creating customer value from a service industry perspective
  4. Running an integrated help desk
  5. Reducing IT Operational Costs
  6. Improve availability
  7. Optimization of resource Utilization

Considering the above benefits, it truly does not matter if it’s a large or a small organization, it’s very lucrative and we definitely get a lot of advantages by implementing ITIL framework.
I will try and capsule my ideas of implementing ITIL (specific to Small organizations) and document in a very simple and understandable format. This is purely from my perspective; I have implemented and it served and worked effectively in reality.

  1. Depending upon the industry (service or product), ITIL implementation can be initiated by conducting the discussion between the business and engineering. Outcome of the discussion can be multiple action items and the most important will be the agreed SLA.
  2. Second and very important step will be to form a strong team of resources which understands each and every issue/requirements from both functional and technical standpoint. We can name the team as the control team and will be the approving authority for any change to the existing system.
  3. ITIL has a lot of process and it is very tough to implement all of them right from the word go. I feel, it’s a good practice to start with Incident Management, Problem Management, Knowledge management, change control management and release management and setup the process, expectation and teams accordingly.
  4. Implementing the above 5 process and meeting the SLA will give the results which will address the important ROI’s like service downtime that the business tolerate, acceptable recovery time, running an integrated help desk, reducing IT Operational Costs, Improve availability.
  5. Assign process owners/leads.

The flow can be as below,

  1. Strong Help desk team which will record the incident and check for available solutions in the KMDB or raise a problem ticket, assign and follow up.
  2. Effective Problem management/production support team which will work on the solutions and request for change.
  3. As mentioned before, control team which will analyze the change and approve. (Post approval–Close problem management)
  4. A hands on release team to deploy the changes (Post deployment–Close change Management)
  5. Incident Management/Help Desk to confirm the successful change and update the KMDB accordingly (Post confirmation–Close Incident Management)

There are many other aspects which will be controlled by implementing the above process. The control team can make sure of approving the required and correct CMR (change management requests) by which we can control and minimize the after change errors which is the main cause of production outages.

Some of the other key processes are capacity management, availability management, information security, risk management, configuration management, asset management, event management, access management and each process has their own benefits. We can initiate, implement and sustain with these 5 processes first and once successful, we can try and sneak the other process one by one and will fall in place.

What organization doesn’t want an increase in productivity? Or is there an organization that does not entertain cost and operational benefits. We can always customize the framework and implement process to meet our needs.

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It’s Time to Put Value in the Driver’s Seat

Deliver value. It is the mantra of every agile or lean team and a big part of the conversation among traditional or waterfall teams as well. You would expect, then, for all teams to define a product’s value explicitly and transparently—to make it the basis for every decision, the determining factor behind every potential product feature. Yet, too often this is not the case.

Let’s explore how successful teams define value, use it to drive decisions, and consider and reconsider value throughout a product’s lifecycle.

Let Value Be Your Guide

According the Value Standard and Body of Knowledge value is “a fair return or equivalent in goods, services, or money for something exchanged.” In other words, value is what you get for what you give up.

What one company considers valuable, at a certain time, might be completely different than what matters to another company, or to the same organization at another point in time. For example, one team we recently worked with selected a minimum set of product features, or slice of functionality, that could be delivered to their primary end users within two months, so as to stay within the bounds of a highly profitable purchase agreement. Another organization identified the set of features that simultaneously reduced operating costs and flagged conditions in the field that could risk life and limb.

So how did these teams decide on what to deliver? What enabled them to quickly, transparently, and collaboratively select the highest value features? They relied on value to steer their product in the right direction.

Choose Your Destination

Defining a product’s desired result, before building it, is fundamental to that product’s success. As the old saying goes, if you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there. Successful agile teams start by determining where they want to finish.

In our first article in this series, we described how product stakeholders from the customer, business, and technology realms become collaborating partners. These product partners envision the product, define goals, and specify measurable objectives, creating a high-level view of the desired product outcomes. These key markers describe and quantify the product’s anticipated value, ensuring that the team is always moving in the correct direction.

One aspect to consider is the tangible, financial qualities, including measures such as IRR (internal rate of return), ROI (return on investment), TCO (total cost of ownership), and EVA (economic value added). Value, though, is about more than money; it is also about intangible aspects, such as user experience, joy, belonging, convenience, sense of well being, trust, alignment to strategy, upsell potential, or brand projection. These intangibles can often be as or more important than tangible value qualities, such as cost or profit margins. Though these intangible considerations are more elusive to measure, they can be quantified by accounting for uncertainty and risk. (For more on this, we recommend Hubbard’s How to Measure Anything).

One of the ways to uncover both tangible and intangible value is to have the product partners explore and share their own value considerations. A value consideration is some variable that is used when assessing the value of your product options. For example, the customer partners might include safety or a convenient-to-use product among their value considerations. Business partners (the people sponsoring the product’s development) might be most concerned about market positioning or protecting the company’s reputation. The technology partners (those who build the product) might be more interested in feasibility and compatibility with existing and future architecture. Making all of these varied (and often competing) value considerations transparent is crucial for making good decisions.

Identify Potential Hazards

Another aspect to consider when making value decisions is risk. Like value, risks change with time and can impede, mitigate, or even obviate delivered value. These risks include rework (if the wrong thing is delivered or technical debt is incurred), noncompliance, opportunity cost, and more. We recommend you consider risks along the same categories as we consider product partners: customer, business and technology.

Dependencies—product and project, internal and external—also constrain product decisions. For example, the partners need to understand the consequences of deviating from an optimal sequence, in both time and cost.

Plot the Preliminary Route

With the guideposts of vision, goals, and objectives in sight, and a clear view of all the tangible and intangible value considerations, the product partners can select the best set of high-value product features (options) for the next planning horizon. (In our second article in this series we define options and describe how teams discover them for all 7 Product Dimensions.) To do this, they consider the costs, benefits, risks, dependencies, and value considerations of each option. They then adjust each option’s value up or down accordingly, always ensuring the option is aligned with the product’s vision, goals and objectives.

Together, the desired outcomes, value considerations, benefits, and risks make up the business value model for a product. The product partners use the value model during discovery and delivery to guide their decisions. In the next article in this series we’ll describe how the partners plan collaboratively, choosing decision-making rules and the timing of the decisions, favoring the last responsible moment.

maryellen May13

Adjust Course As Needed

Discovering value isn’t a one-and-done activity. The product partners repeat the process at every planning horizon: the long-term (Big-View), the interim-term (Pre-View), and the short-term (Now-View). Throughout the product’s lifecycle, the partners stay alert to changes in market conditions, availability of resources, costs of delay, etc., and their potential impact on the product, modifying the business value model as needed.

After each delivery cycle, the partners determine if what was delivered actually realizes the anticipated value. This comparison may uncover gaps to be addressed in future releases. Though the Lean Startup movement has made this seem like a new concept, we’ve long had a name for it in requirements engineering: validation. In Discover to Deliver, we call it “confirm to learn.”

Ensure Optimal Visibility

Before value can drive decisions, it must be defined, visible, and well understood by all concerned. Teams need to understand what value means through the eyes of the stakeholders—the product partners from business, customer, and technology. They can then view potential product options (requirements) in the context of these values to choose the most valuable set of features for each release.

When was the last time you collaboratively discussed and purposefully validated your value assumptions? Take some time in your next planning session to honestly and transparently define your product’s value, so that value truly becomes the driving force behind your product decisions.

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References:
Gottesdiener, Ellen and Mary Gorman. Discover to Deliver: Agile Product Planning and Analysis. EBG Consulting, 2012.
Hubbard, Douglas. How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business. 3rd edition, Wiley, 2014.
SAVE International. Value Standard and Body of Knowledge. June 2007. Available online here.

The Road to Being a Business Champion is to Train Like an Olympian

Have you ever admired the strength, flexibility and endurance of an Olympic Athlete? It takes a lot of dedication to become a successful athlete. Olympians are at the apex of perfection. The fact that they get to go to the games is amazing, but to win makes them champions. There are secrets in training and preparations that Olympic Athletes have that increase their potential for success. As business leaders we can learn a lot from Olympic Athletes to help us become business champions.

Here are a few tips from the best of the best:

Have a Plan: It is amazing how many business leaders do not have a plan–they just wing it. The reality of being a top athlete is that you must have a plan. From diet, to workouts, to rest, there is a plan of focused intent. Know what it is you want to accomplish and why it is so important. Have a strategic road map for your business success.

Create a Routine: A routine is everything. It is part of your plan. Routines require an emphasis on high value activities. Focus on those things that will make a difference to you and your business. Schedule them in and make sure you do them.

Take Care of Yourself: Top performers usually have off-the-chart energy. How do they manage this? They take care of themselves through a healthy dose of proper eating and rest. Even the greatest boxer who ever lived, Mohammed Ali, ate well and rested. He took one day off a week to relax and ease his body and mind.

Proper warm-up and recovery: If you are going to work hard then you need to ensure you have proper warm up and recovery. This includes creating a natural rhythm to your business, as well as building in agility and flexibility. This is something that should be part of any good business practice. You and your people need to ensure they take the time needed to remain limber and prepared.

It’s all in the Head: Mental preparation is all about psychologically preparing for the big events. It is easy to get psyched out and think you or your people are not good enough. You need to tell yourself and your team they are the best at what they do. Create mindful rehearsals, read inspirational books, or count your blessings daily. Whatever it takes to build the mindset of a champion.

Consider a Trainer and Coach: Great athletes have coaches–we all know this. Business leaders who want to mix it up know they need help. From motivation to accountability, a coach can make a difference.
Be dynamic on your business: You can’t just focus on one thing in your business. You need to consider all the moving parts and train yourself in those parts. Olympic Athletes switch things up using fixed to variable equipment; they run, jump, throw, row, and do a lot more. The key, they mix things up.

Engage your People: Olympians have a team of engaged people who are rooting for them. It includes many key stakeholders including family and friends, sponsors and vendors, managers, coaches, trainers and peers. Engaging your team is important for your business as well. It is important you find a way to connect your people to what it is you want to accomplish. Engage the people that are in your corner.

Prepare for Heavy Lifting: All champions need to build their strength and endurance. Find ways to build your ability to deal with the events that are the heavy lifting of your business success. Build core competencies in yourself and those around you. Part of an Olympic Athlete’s heavy lifting ability is having a strong, engaged core. The same is true in business: businesses without a strong core tend to have more challenges. . Make sure you have engaged your core.

Train Early in the Day: Common wisdom says to train early in the day. Most Olympic Athletes do. Create an early ritual of getting focused, reviewing your strategic plan and the work plans that you have laid out. Focus on building up skills that will take you to where you need to go.

Build your Training Team: A dedicated team is everything for a Champion. You must have a team that will not only work with you, but also train with you. Olympic athletes are known to train together for years before they turn to competing against each other. Therefore, a training team can include your peers, your team and your competitors. Olympians train with their competition so they get better.

In business we ultimately want to be the best at what we do—we want to become champions. One of the best places to look for inspiration is at our Olympic Champions and the hard work and dedication they put into being the best at what they do. Like them, the first step to becoming the best is to think and act like a champion.

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Process Patterns – Applying Method to Chaos

Unpredictability. Randomness. Chaos.

They are the only certainty in the life of any Business Analyst. Even more so for the brave ones painting green-field processes for a large enterprise project.

Throwing up our hands in despair is not a choice. And making costly changes to a program of work midstream will not endear us with the Project Managers ( and that’s putting it mildly).

I was faced with such a challenge in the last year working as a Lead Business Analyst for a major program of work. Process patterns came to my rescue.

Patterns in real life

Humans are intuitively programmed to bring structure around us. Every successful civilization has worked on making society predictable. Our approach to science has been no different from life. We are governed by patterns — climate, seasons, diurnal dance of the planets in the solar system, etc. Where they do not exist we invent one — transport, communication, weekends, etc.

Astronomers see patterns in the random sprinkling of stars in the sky. Mathematicians look for fractal patterns even in the most chaotic distribution. Bio-technologists search for patterns in DNA. Climatologists study weather patterns to predict global warming effects. Every field involved in handling complex systems deploys the use of patterns to analyse and simplify. 

Alex Bellos, in his fascinating book Alex’s Adventures in Numberland, talks of intricate design patterns in the mosque as a way of finding God through patterns.

Patterns in IT world

Patterns occur in everything.

Design patterns are a very common methodology in developing IT systems. Creational, Behavioural and Structural patterns are quite common thought processes used by Developers.

Data mining is deployed to understand information, correlate and study the behaviour of discrete data points. Statistical tools are very common to understand variance, randomness and distribution.

Interaction pattern is the development of a framework to model inter-organization interactions (can be used for intra-organizational too) to predict the exchange of information. Request, Acknowledge, Respond is such a pattern that could be deployed between a Customer and Supplier framework for interactions.

Process patterns is the emergent ability to define fragments that will provide a reliable mechanism for handling random events in a complex system.

Process Patterns

In the program of work I was involved in, I established the Happy Day Scenario using Level 4 processes at an activity level. Process patterns were then used to decompose individual Level 4 activity into Level 5 processes at the task level.

Embracing Murphy’s law, we soon firmed up that anything that can go wrong will go wrong. Data may be missing or inaccurate. System integration can break. People can make mistakes. Hence scenarios were soon approaching quite a large number. Defining a Level 5 Task process for each Scenario would have been a hopeless exercise. And we would have missed the forest for the trees. This is the key distinction for mapping patterns between Scenario-driven and Pattern-Driven.

The answer I felt was in the identification of the pattern in the process. For instance, a set of tasks could lead to the happy-day outcome. What would happen if things go wrong? We established a pattern for exception as follows:

  1. Resolve the exception using the system as part of the activity (Automatic resolution pattern; e.g., Re-try transaction)
  2. Resolve the exception manually as part of the activity (Manual resolution pattern; e.g., Fix data issue and re-try task)
  3. Resolve the exception and re-enter the activity (Activity Re-entry pattern; E.g., Fix issue and re-enter from the first task in the activity)
  4. Resolve the exception and re-enter from the previous activity (Process Re-entry pattern; e.g., Fix issue and re-enter process from an earlier activity)
  5. Resolve the exception by abandoning the process (Process Abandonment pattern; E.g., Cancel Order and re-commence)

Similarly, patterns were established for workflows, sub-processes, alternate flows and product types.

It was a fun exercise to map these patterns and ask our business stakeholders to challenge with scenarios. We were lucky to have a lot of black-hat thinkers who could come up with What-if situations based on data, systems or people exceptions and test the process pattern. The use of the right combination of process patterns stood the test in most cases.

Process Pattern led Design

Advantages of the process patterns were it fostered the need to design based on patterns. So the thinking is percolating to the way systems are developed. Further testing is simplified by testing the core patterns. Since we ended up with close to 100 process patterns (yes, it was a complex program), testing was prioritized for the critical patterns and scenarios chosen to ensure each pattern worked.
Process patterns provided us with some level of insulation from changes that are constantly happening in our business landscape. The introduction of new products, contracts or customer interactions have largely been channelled through existing process patterns.

And to quote Richard Bach below, the recognition of process patterns can help us see new horizons.

A cloud does not know why it moves in just such a direction and at such a speed…It feels an impulsion…this is the place to go now. But the sky knows the reasons and the patterns behind all clouds, and you will know, too, when you lift yourself high enough to see beyond horizons.”
– Richard Bach, Author of Jonathan Livingston Seagull

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