strategy Archives - Better Process Solutions

Strategy time, how much do you invest in it?

Strategy time, do you spend enough time creating your business strategy?

Strategic work is one of the most critical that a leader has to do. A strategy is how the business is set out to achieve its objectives and goals. Therefore, to attain them, leadership needs to focus on the necessary long-term business actions. Also, they need to make decisions and allocate resources to support the action plan to achieve those goals. There is no doubt you need to spend time to make this happen. The question is, how much do you invest in strategy time?

Why leaders do not spend enough on strategy time

When you run a business, especially if you are a solopreneur, you wear various hats every day. You start the day with the firm intention of completing your tasks for the day. Perhaps, working on your long-term business plans is one of them. However, instead of analyzing trends and thinking about a new product or service, you find yourself putting out fires.

It is hard to let go of the day-to-day operation. When you don’t have skilled people to handle it, it is almost impossible. Nevertheless, success depends on how you manage the situation. It is too risky not to solve problems before they are too big to handle. For example, your customers are waiting for quick and satisfactory resolutions to their problems.

Thinking about and create a new strategy to achieve business goals is a huge undertaking. If you choose the wrong one, you could lose market share, money, or even credibility. Perhaps the fear of failure is what prevents you from spending time working on strategy.

What can you do to have more strategy time?

There are three things that you can do to have more time to work on your business strategy. You can develop your team skills, delegate, and schedule strategic work.

Most of the time, the cause of firefighting is unstable processes that are lacking standards. Therefore, you would have to work on stabilizing them. Simple tools like 5S and PDCS will help with that task. Later use problem-solving to start moving the needle in the right direction. Using the 5 Why and Cause and Effect, you can develop your team skills. Consequently, they can take care of solving day-to-day problems following a set structure.

Delegation is not as simple as asking somebody to do some of your tasks. First, you need to identify what tasks you can delegate. Second, see who from your team is a candidate to learn those tasks. Analyze their current skills, education, experience, and interests to find the best fit.

Schedule your strategic work

To ensure that you spend time on strategic work, put it on your calendar. This activity is not for the end of the year only. For instance, you should work on long-term planning throughout the year. There are two parts, check on the current strategy performance and work on the future.

Set aside chunks of time to think about the future. Whenever an idea pops into your mind, make a note. Then, work on enhancing them during strategic work time. Imagine how those ideas connect with your current operation.

Putting something on the calendar does not mean that it will happen. You will need to create the habit to work on strategy. For example, use a calendar reminder as your trigger for the creation routine. Reward yourself with something nice that you enjoy. After all, you will be one step closer to the goal.

Summary

You start with a dream, a goal, something big you want to achieve with your business. To reach that goal, you have to create a map, a list of actions that the company needs to take. Those actions or strategy is what would bridge the gap between goal and achievement.

Visionary leaders take time to imagine the future and build ways to go there. You can do that by thinking ahead. Think about how the market would change and how the business needs to adapt. Or what new product or service would help to solve a customer problem.

Focusing on day by day is important, but the long-term approach is vital for business growth. As the owner or top leader, the time you spend on strategic thinking is very well invested. When you develop your team skills, you can step back from at least some daily tasks. Whenever that happens, you can spend the much-needed time on strategic work.

Business Performance

Why did your strategy fail?

Your strategy failed, but why?

Why did your strategy fail? That is a question that you ask when things did not go as planned. During the last quarter of the fiscal year, entrepreneurs will take time to work on new strategies and plans. Those are the things that will become the compass to guide the business during the next year. I am talking about the budget and the business plan.

Action Plans are the reason why your strategy fails

Strategies for the areas of quality, cost, delivery, people development, and any other you feel adequate for your business are as effective as the action plans to achieve the objectives are. Each strategy needs a good plan, a story that tells how you will attain the business objectives and goals. Many companies fail to create a good action plan, and therefore the strategies fail. Authors David Norton and Robert Kaplan indicate in their book The Balanced Scorecard that ninety percent of organizations fail to execute their plans successfully. The following are the top three reasons why action plans, and therefore strategies, fail.

Lack of clarity

The goal or objective sometimes is not clear, is open to different interpretations, which leads to confusion and lack of accountability. While stating your business goals, make sure to say what you want to achieve in simple words. Be specific and never assume people know what you are talking about. Make clear who is responsible for getting the results. Name a person, not a department, or a group as the responsible party. Finally, make crystal clear time expectations for completion.

Unrealistic goals

Another problem is that goals are not SMART, specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-based. Unrealistic goals are often the result of the leadership process of setting goals without any involvement with the people who will be responsible. There is no doubt that many leaders know their operations, but not better than the people working in the trenches every day. By making your mid-level managers part of the planning process, you can make sure that objectives are clear, goals are realistic, performance is measured with the right metric, and the time estimated for completion is attainable.

Broken communication

The three C’s of Effective Communication, clear, collaborative, and consistent are indispensable for planning execution effectiveness. Specific, crystal clear plans are critical to avoid confusion and ensure accountability. Regardless of how good people in your team is, they need help to achieve the company goals. Collaboration between team members is critical for success. Not taking the time to listen to each other, not to judge or blame but to learn and help each other is a big mistake that will lead to not achieving the goals.

Effective communication has to start from the moment the plans are being drafted, continue once they are published to ensure everybody is aligned, and keep going during the year to revise performance and reflect on actions and results. Make a routine of asking for progress during regular meetings, ask for challenges, what is working, what is not working. Be on the lookout for changes in assumptions, the market environment, or any other change that may affect performance. Talk about how to adapt or change the plan, is the goal still attainable, or does it need revision?

What to do to avoid that your strategy fails

To be in the ten percent of organizations that execute their strategies successfully, make sure to define the strategy and state SMART goals. For your planning process, identify all the action plans that are necessary to achieve each strategy. Be clear, realistic, and communicate effectively with the right people while designing the action plan. Once completed, ensure to be clear about who is responsible and the timing for completion. Talk about the goals frequently, revise performance, assumptions, and results. Reflect upon those things and adapt the plan if necessary. Success is not easy, but it is possible by not losing sight of your destination and using your compass (action plans and goals reflection) to get there on time.

Business Performance

How do I prepare to reopen my business?

We are preparing to return to some kind of normalcy in our lives, including reopening our businesses. When we open the doors, the business situation will be very different from what it was before the pandemic crisis began. You had a vision for your business and a plan to drive you there, but now everything is different.

It is time to sit down and reflect on the future. The starting point will be to understand the challenges that are coming right to us. With the help of your team, answer the questions below and then update your business plan. Things like the sales forecasts, costs, and other assumptions will change.

Reopening implies changes, what needs to change in your operation?
Do you need to invest in protective equipment, such as acrylic panels or floor markings?
What new recurrent costs you will have to fulfill new safety requirements?
How the market will change?
Do your customers would need something different?
Does your value proposition need to change?

After adapting the business plan to the new environment, establish your new objectives and strategy. Rethink your business strategy carefully, how you guide your decision-making process from now on can be your competitive advantage.

Your business plan is your guide to the future you envision, but you also need short-term plans to prepare the operation for the new requirements. What processes have to change? Do you need to implement new processes to ensure your team and customers’ safety? Does the work area need changes to adapt to social distancing? How will you control traffic and flow?

Many tools will help you to analyze, design and test solutions, PDCA is one of them. To ensure everybody does the same thing standard work and visual management are important. Sometimes there is no time for a long analysis, but you can still practice continuous improvement. If you are not doing it already, build the habit to have daily meetings with your staff. We call them stand-up meetings, or daily huddles.

During them the team do a quick review of the operation the day before. The key here is to ask two important questions, what went well and what needs improvement. You want to discover the reason for the gap between desired and current state. A quick 5 Why discussion can lead to simple solutions that can be implemented during the shift.

From now on, the way to conduct business should be different. This is the time to prepare yourself and your business for the future. Given how fast everything changes with the development of the COVID-19 pandemic, the business of the future demands good leadership, employees and leaders engaged in common goals and flexibility. Continuous improvement and lean thinking promote that kind of behaviors.

Focus on the things you can control, take a deep breath and start creating your future. Be safe, stay well.

Business Performance

What is your business strategy?

The seven steps to deploy your business strategy using strategic deployment or hoshin kanji.

A business strategy establishes the framework to make decisions. In other words, how to conduct business, deliver value to your customers, and achieve target revenues and profits. Strategic planning answers the question, where are we going, and how do we get there?

Strategy Deployment, or strategic policy deployment

How do you deploy your strategy through the organization? That is to say, how do your employees know the company goals? Do you have a system or process? In CI, we use Hoshin planning.

Hoshin planning or hoshin kanri means strategic policy deployment. That is, identify the strategy to follow, develop objectives, communicate, and execute the plan. Hoshin is one of the various methodologies for strategic planning that emerge from Peter Drucker’s Management by Objectives (MBO). Some of the characteristics are that it plans at different timeframes, from short-term to long-term. Moreover, it uses SMART goals. Those components are similar to other systems. However, this one uses PDCA and establishes periodic reviews to assess performance against the plan.

Seven steps to deploy your business strategy

In general, Hoshin planning has seven steps.

Assess the current state and establish the Vision
Develop breakthrough objectives
Develop annual objectives
Deploy annual objectives
Implement annual objectives
Monthly and quarterly review
Annual review

Your business strategy and people’s development

Strategy deployment addresses critical business needs by aligning goals and strategy. Even more, it aligns the company’s resources at all levels. For that reason, it makes it possible to respond quickly to changes in the business environment. Also, the use of the PDCA cycle brings a structure to deal with those changes. Moreover, it provides a framework to identify and solve the problem.

Besides, with Hoshin, leaders can develop the team’s skills and capabilities. They do it by engaging them to answer the question of how do we get there? Leaders will guide their teams based on their knowledge and experience. Aligned goals ensure that everyone is working toward the same ends. The newly developed problem-solvers will row in the same direction as you do to accomplish those goals.

Continuous improvement as a strategy

In the times of the COVID-19 pandemic, it is vital to be flexible. That is to say, to make decisions and create strategies to adjust to ever-changing realities. A system for strategy deployment will guide you to analyze the situation. Further, it will be a guide to design and implement a new business strategy.

Moreover, continuous improvement can be your strategy to create a flexible workforce and guide daily improvements. Better Process Solutions can help give us a call!

Customer Experience

Do you know what is the best thing you can do to achieve Customer Satisfaction?

If you have a business, then you know how important it is to know how much the customers like your service or product. They are the best source for learning about improvement opportunities, their ideas tell you what needs to be improved, and sometimes they even suggest solutions. You need to listen to the Voice of the Customer, if you and your team understand this, you won half of the battle, already.

I remember a situation years ago when one of our most important clients was complaining about a recurring problem. The plant was consistently delivering late, causing them problems with their customers. The root cause analysis pointed to the packaging department, where the team was encouraged to have larger runs. Their goal was to avoid changing products to minimize downtime.

In a different case, the warehouse team was ignoring the 360º inspection before shipping to save time. The customer was receiving products with defects. They wanted to achieve the goal of two hours trucks turn around. The problem with these two examples is that neither of those team leaders understood the relationship between what they do and customer satisfaction.

As a business owner, you need to ensure that your business strategy and goals are aligned. Your team must know the priorities. Encourage asking questions when they have doubts. Talked with them about customer expectations and how their work affects them.

The best thing you can do to achieve your customer satisfaction goals is to accept that your team is first. It has to be a priority for you to train and develop your people. Provide them with the tools and information they need to do their job and opportunities to learn more and grow. If the team feels appreciated, they will be your secret weapon to achieve success. When you take care of your team, they take care of the customers.

Business Performance

What is a strategy? Do you have one?

Strategy is game plan, the framework to make decisions. — Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

Strategy and Planning

Many people confuse strategy with planning. A strategy is the game plan for strengthening your business performance. It establishes the framework to make decisions. In other words, it defines the way to conduct business, deliver value to your customers, and achieve target profits. On the other hand, planning is how you are going to achieve the business objectives and goals.

A plan without a strategy will not be effective. Every organization needs a shared vision of where it is going. In addition, it needs to know what is the business model, and what will drive decisions. The strategy is how you are going to overcome the biggest hurdles. It is what guides everybody in the same direction.

You create a plan after you know where you are going and what will frame the decision-making process. Each project is specific for a goal and contains the detailed steps to achieve it. Effective planning requires a look into the company’s strengths and weaknesses and taking countermeasures.

Continuous Improvement, Lean as a business strategy

Lean is a business management system, that when it is implemented as a whole, constitutes a great framework to conduct business. The goal of lean or continuous improvement is to provide the customer with the highest quality, at the lowest cost, in a shorter time. Therefore, by using lean as a strategy, you will set your business for success.

Hoshin planning is the process used to identify and address critical business needs and develop people’s capabilities. Continuous improvement or lean is a strategy to win by developing the team into problem solvers. At times of economic uncertainty, it is critical to respond to changes in the business environment as fast as possible.

When you and your employees know how to identify and respond to the daily challenges, the opportunities for success grow exponentially. Never is late to change your strategy, and win!