Monday, May 16, 2022

Linking Strategy to Operations Easily

While it is never easy to link strategy to operations, specific approaches, methods, techniques, and technologies can make it easier. Today, all organizations are challenged to drive growth and optimize business operations in a compliant and socially enlightened way. Change is being imposed by changing conditions that may imply opportunities or threats. It is on top of organizations wanting to better their customer relationships, products, and services. Therefore, high-performance decisions and actions must be delivered under all strategic, tactical, and execution/operational conditions. IT means prioritizing responses dynamically. This blog will explore the priority of efforts organizations can take optimizing on ease.

There are three states organizations can be in and out of based on what’s happening in and around them. Often all states are happening at once in various proportions.




Steady State

This state is where the change winds are light. it is often the calm in the periods between significant changes or when complex change settles back to a more normal pace. It is where typical dashboards, management reports, and balanced scorecards can be designed and implemented with management keeping an eye on early change indicators.

Adaptive State

This state is typically in an active change period like we are going through with COVID, war, and supply chain challenges. Here, there is dynamic and real-time observance looking for events, signals, and note patterns. Once detected and oriented, decisions can be made for actions throughout the organization and the contexts it operates at the moment. Often these are imposed changes.

Planned Change State

It is where management with a clear mind can plan programs and projects from the evolution of operations incrementally to total transformations. It is often where new markets are targeted, new products/services are introduced, and mergers/acquisitions are planned for future execution involving programs and projects.


Figure 1 Strategy Links


Linking Strategy to Operations on the Easy Curve


Listed below are the categories of activities that have your operations linked to strength. They are listed in order of ease to attempt. Organizations can go way over the edge to make any of these more complicated than they need to be, so this order is advisory. It could be different for your industry, type of organization, or your culture. Keep in mind that the closer to the core of Figure 1 (operational views) and stable strategies, the easier it is to link strategy to operations. As organizations approach the outer rings of figure one, especially in the adaptive state, the more difficult linking moving strategies to operations becomes. It is essential to understand that methods, tools, and techniques help with the outer edge and handle the whole "link to strategy" continuum depicted in Figure 1.



Performance Management

Performance management starts with human visibility and automated notifications. It could be as simple as a standalone dashboard or as complex as a functionally integrated management cockpit looking for patterns and events in real-time.

Process Optimization

Processes must constantly get better as customers demand a better experience, and exceptions are noted, analyzed, and dealt with within manual and automated processes. The optimization process often includes mining, visualization, and analysis. In extreme cases, advanced formulas and AI play a role. Scopes can expand to whole B2B chains.

Quality Management

The processes, production lines, and supply chains need to be optimized, but these results must also be dealt with in terms of quality and customer delight. It is crucial to devise ways of inspecting and getting feedback on quality. It can be manual or automated. When automating and training technology from data and experts, the complexity can get edgy.

Governance/Compliance

While compliance is essential to stay active in markets and geographies, the methods are often emergent. While the rules may be evolving, the processes and constraints are continually developing as target dates loom.

Risk Management

As every organization has a specific risk culture, it is difficult to assess risk. While it is often easier to determine the frequency of a chance happening, the threshold for particular actions is often a challenge. The skill level of the decision-makers has to be high, steeped with deep knowledge, and often experienced with projections.

Program/Project Management

Managing a goal-led approach to delivering improvements or necessary changes is often a big challenge. Keeping everyone up to date with changes and getting all skills to collaborate equally is a big deal. Tracking change effectiveness leveraging before and after deltas is always a chore.

Strategy Management

Knowing the right strategy for current or emerging conditions is very difficult. Often it requires deep planning to recognize patterns of opportunity or threat. Then, once detected, a bevy of analytical/simulation models usually has to test responses in uncertain situations.

Net; Net:

Is it easy to link strategy to operations and tune tactics? I would submit that it depends on the situation and the emerging strategy. One thing is for sure. There are methods, tactics, tools, and techniques that can make it easier, faster, and more effective. Some of the blog posts listed in additional reading might help the reader. In addition, there are a couple of vendors who can help with this approach.  Wizsm Tibco.


Additional Reading:

Monday, May 9, 2022

Gain Significant Results with Goal-Led Collaboration


Several savvy organizations had picked up on the power of goal-led collaboration and applied them to real-world situations. Here are two very interesting case studies that come from very different directions but share the common benefit of customer delight.


The first case study is attempting a problem that folks have been struggling with for decades. Many people have dreamed of helping children with Autism. Click Here for an impressive benefit case study that will warm your heart. The tangible benefits, while unrealized right now, will be delivered later. The intangible benefits for patients and families will start the evolution.

The second case study is about how a B2B focused organization delivered tangible and crisp benefits that were impressive during the initial times of COVID. The benefits made everyone in the CX suite grin from ear to ear. Many of us would love to deliver a 29% increase in revenue while reducing costs by an impressive 30%. All of this while reducing the time to deliver from 6 weeks to 2 days. Click Here for an impressive hard benefit case study that would make most of us proud.

Wednesday, May 4, 2022

Transforming While Attaining Stretch Goals

It's hard to imagine making a significant transformation within a large multi-national B2B organization while dealing with the complications of COVID and supply chain issues. However, this case does just that while attaining the triple crown of business benefits of increased revenue, decreased costs, and a significant value increase by reducing the "time to respond." This organization achieved impressive results by leveraging an outside-in approach to customer outcomes while driving results with goal-led collaboration. As a result, they were able to expand during the time of COVID on a large scale. Let's check this case study out.



The Challenge

· The order to dispatch cycle was six weeks on average, creating problems for all customers.

· The customers were also delayed in providing products and services to their customers/dealers.

· The complexity of change across multiple markets and countries

This large organization has leadership in three major business sectors. First, it must continue providing products and services while significantly changing the ordering process, compounding problems downstream. Second, this 3+ billion-dollar revenue company has to improve across all 100+ countries it services. All of these forces were being affected by the COVID impacts. Third, the innovation required will insist on including the customers and the customers of the direct customers.

The Solution

It started with understanding the current situation and what the customers wanted. This was done leveraging an outside-in approach to creating customer confidence. This organization used the CEM Method to guide the process that helped discover the customer's real needs, design customer profiles around the real needs, and deploy smoothly. These efforts were managed with goal-led collaborations that linked actions to outcomes from the sponsor all the way to the doers with clear visibility.

· Providing solid and stable providers

· Providing products/services as and when specified

· Run without disruption


The Benefits

These benefits were derived from goal-led collaboration guided by the CEM method, continuous optimization individually and collectively aimed at the primary goals. There was a significant reduction in order dispatch resulting in cost reduction and revenue increases while increasing customer confidence in the uncertainty of COVID

· Order dispatch time reduced from 6 weeks to 2 days

· Increased revenue by 29%

· Reduced costs by 30%


Net; Net:

This approach generates happier customers with significant changes to business results. This case study reached the triple crown of increased revenue, decreased costs, and more value by leveraging goal-led collaboration while looking at the problem and solutions from the "outside-in."

This case study was provided and assisted by Parallel  Click here for a link



Case Study Goal Life Cycle Impacts Highlighted in Blue

For an Explanation of the Goal Life Cycle Components, Please Refer to the Blog Posts Below

For a Goal Life Cycle Explanation, click here

For Better Goal Management, click here

For Goal Led Technologies, click here