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The business has been running for some time now. New requirements and issues get managed, handled and incorporated as required. Staff numbers have risen slightly but people work hard. There are delays and a lot of work waiting on something, but your more senior and experienced people manage that, so you’re coping just, but:
Do you want your business to run more smoothly?
- Are too many mistakes made?
- Are staff overloaded and dealing mainly with issues rather than getting the work out?
- Are you suffering from missing information?
- Are there too many gaps and overlaps?
- Are there backlogs of work building up due to errors and missing information?
- Is there always more work than time to do it?
- Are you constantly being asked to do more?
- Is everything a priority?
Consider the bigger picture, are the same problems happening across the business? Are local changes making it more and more difficult to get work done, outcomes achieved and delivered to the customers? Are local business unit priorities getting in the way of getting the actual business done?
Can you link the activities and priorities being followed in each business area back to your business model? Can you link your business model directly to your strategy and strategic priorities?
Can you define and track your business and commercial performance targets and priorities from your commercial and business strategy, directly through to your business model and then down hierarchically into your detailed processes and day to day activities? Is your business model just an abstract idea that doesn’t help in making decision, setting priorities and managing performance?
Sound familiar? Then it’s time for a change...
Where’s the Value..?
How much of what staff spend their time doing is adding real value to the business? How much is re-work or handling errors or searching for missing information? How long does it take to bring new staff up to speed and able to do the full range of work involved? How much of the everyday task routines are documented?
It’s time to re-define and re-organise the work activities to ensure that it:
- Generates the required value for you and your customers
- Focuses on strategic value and priorities
- Delivers the value at a proportionate cost from the end-to-end perspective of the business
- Makes sure that staff work only on the value activities
- Organises the tasks to detect and avoid rework and errors
- Balances cost with flexibility, scalability and risk
- Uses role design, task allocation and skill-set matching as a key means of minimising costs
- Builds performance, reliability and scalability into the new business processes and organisational structures
- Contains appropriate measures and controls
- Enables adequate governance
It’s a tall order to achieve all this, especially in a large organisation with different divisions, functions and differing priorities. Competing motivations and criteria for success need to be balanced and aligned.
Betting the Future on a Quick Fix…?
In our experience, real business design simply doesn’t happen too often. In practice, what tends to occur is “solutioneering”: a solution is needed – and it’s needed quickly because there’s a mountain of detailed implementation work to be done and the market needs a rapid response.
The assumption is that it can be fixed later, but later never comes until there is a crisis - and then there’s not enough time to fix it again and the cycle repeats.
Another Way - Better by Design..!
Business design takes expertise and some up-front time to get a result that is flexible and lasts. Solutioneering approaches mistake action for progress and end up taking longer, often much longer.
Here, at Kairos, we have spent over 20 years putting engineering principles and practices into business change and re-design. We have developed a repeatable, reliable, engineered approach to business design as part of our value-based change engineering approach.
We think that only your people can design a solution in detail that will work for you. To do this, they need a structure, some powerful tools and to learn business design from experts - by doing it. Instant, immediate, expert, guidance, feedback, coaching and mentoring - experiential learning that’s high impact, quick and fun. (yes, fun, really!)
With our One-Team approach, you not only get an efficient, effective and reliable end-to-end business design that meets the requirements of your vision and strategy - and you also get a very high level of skills-transfer to be able to maintain the solution into the future.
Want to know more…
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