Successfully executing a business strategy is an uphill battle, according to a recent white paper that extrapolated from research gathered by Ventana Research. In fact, the paper examined “8 Reasons Your Business Strategy Might Just Fail.” But embedded in those 8 reasons, listed below, were the seeds of success:
- Understand all the outcomes. “Outcomes are the applications, technologies, services, solutions, products, and other essentials you deliver to your customers. You must understand these outcomes in order to harness expertise from every area and execute across your company, partners, suppliers, and others.”
- Capabilities must be strategic. “With digital transformation and changing business models, it’s not enough simply to have a strategic goal. Organizations must understand which business capabilities advance their overall goals and strategies as well as identify, prioritize, and deliver new ones that drive profit.”
- Harness the growing number of work methodologies. “Project management, lean, agile, phase-gate, and many more methodologies are all being used in organizations in pursuit of business goals. As organizations increasingly share resources and collaborate across projects and teams, it is critical to understand how different work methodologies impact the organization and its strategic objectives.”
- Integrate the unstructured work. “The largest body of work in any organization is the day-to-day, unstructured work that employees do both individually and in teams. It’s the energy that fuels businesses everywhere, comprised of everything from tasks to meetings to communications.” Where appropriate, capture its output and integrate it into the portfolio.”
- Plan accordingly. “As you increase speed and agility, it’s critical to have a continuous plan to keep resources aligned and mapped to goals. Think beyond the rigidity of an annual plan to continuous planning on a quarterly, monthly, and even weekly basis, with the ability to communicate changes and contingencies to adapt to changes.
- Leverage your virtual and global teams. “How organizations leverage their global, multicultural, and multigenerational teams will determine by how much they succeed or fail. And putting in place adequate communication tools is vital.” A recent survey showed that business professionals “waste nine work weeks per year trying to collaborate across different organizations, geographies, and toolsets.”
- Let IT lead. While IT “no longer owns technology innovation, there is still a tremendous opportunity for IT to lead digital transformation initiatives and partner with business units in these efforts.”
- Account for multiplying resources. “It’s not as simple as managing people and finances anymore. Organizations must account for Resources (capital ‘R’) that encompass virtual teams, technology, locations, buildings, inventory, and connected devices that make up the ‘Internet of Things,’ and many more.”
The white paper goes on to look at ways to take advantage of these trends and create successful outcomes. Some believe the solution is Project Portfolio Management (PPM), according to the paper, which “provides an excellent way to help people and projects deliver strategy – for some environments.
“However, traditional PPM doesn’t consider or incorporate the many ways that people are currently working in organizations, or the resources available.”
Research Points to the Power of WRM
This is where “Work and Resource Management (WRM) comes into play is a comprehensive category of technology capabilities that address a broader set of work and resource challenges. It includes PPM, but goes much further to address the business and organizational factors in today’s environment.
“WRM serves rapid unstructured work as well as strategic planning and aligning resources to deliver on the strategy. Without such an approach,” according to Ventana Research (http://www.ventanaresearch.com/viewpoint/work-and-resource-management), “organizations increasingly will find themselves without the ability to act and respond as needed, and will find themselves unable to ensure the changes and continuous optimization that is needed to achieve the level of results required in the timeframe expected.”
