4 Tips To Introduce A Radical Business Transformation

Posted on Jun 12 2018 - 5:19pm by Aakash

As stocks rise and fall, the market watch has taught us one thing: no industry is immune to the uncertainties befalling their trade. The need of the hour, then, is to prevent a slump by transforming your business processes using people, processes and technology.

Agility took the IT industry by storm with its focus on team building and interactions over processes and tools. Agile frameworks are branching out now to the non-IT sectors as well, which goes to show how pivotal a role it plays in business process transformation. It not only lets you get ahead with the times but also helps you identify ways to prevent missing the right opportunities.

The 5 tips given here let you employ a business strategy that updates itself to welcome change!

Customer Centricity

When you write down your idea for a product or service, the first question that’ll spring to your mind would be “what  does it help the user achieve?”

In other words, benefits govern your idea’s shelf-life. So long as the outcomes widen customer engagement, the sector you’re operating in will continue to market goods that enjoy long-term popularity. Therefore, it is important to draw the correlation between your product’s relevance and its ability to satisfy the customer’s end requirements.

Given that the right information equals valuable data, big data analytics play a pivotal role in driving customer-centricity initiatives forward. They not only evaluate existing behavior and what causes emotional fluctuations to occur but also lets you modify your business strategy to include these changes as and when they surface. The resource management space, for example, relies on big data to track your staff’s utilization in terms of their time and efforts on the right project investments.

Other benefits of embedding big data into the very being of your business process framework let you :

  1.  Capture your audience, geographies and modifications to existing product and/or service lines in their entirety.
  2. Segment your customers by their interests and use of the end product.
  3. Sketch the digital roadmap such that you can pick up the right opportunities through various channels.
  4. Perform a competitor analysis to study the external environment and understand how to rework smartly without reinventing the wheel.
  5. Create a behavioral model from social media statistics and study internal data that drills down to what your customer would like to see in future releases.
  6. Build a product review engine in the form of feedback surveys that invite your users to rate their experience. You can then build future products around both business and technical feasibility.
  7. Analyze prior transactions from sales history to predict future buying trends.

Utilize Digitality

The age of the internet is all about giving and taking in equal measures. It lets you market your product and/or service offering while letting your audience get wind of the latest updates. As more and more firms join the internet bandwagon, the market noise increases. Knowing where to begin lets you implement transformations successfully such that you penetrate this ‘noise’ and mark the perimeter of your business process framework. Start by asking yourself these  questions:

  1. Have you identified and classified your firm’s pain points?
  2. Are the measures to counter them relevant enough to consider a reinvestment in previously similar opportunities?
  3. Are your Key Performance Indicators (KPI) evolving to newer opportunities?
  4. Do you have the right resources and capabilities to extract a fruitful business association out of your clients?

Going digital answers these questions and lets you  keep up with technological revolutions as and when they happen. Consequently, your investments in the right business opportunities supplies your stakeholders with information on where and how a radical business transformation boosted performance.

For example, if you include social media plugins to your corporate website,  your firm’s online visibility increases. Users can continue interacting with you even after being redirected to other networks. What’s more, they can receive push notifications in real-time which saves you the trouble of issuing updates through expensive marketing launches. You can then reinvest the budgeting spend in other initiatives such as training schemes that reacquaint your staff with newer technologies being procured!

Strategic Flexibility

Reading between the lines of agility tells you why it emphasizes on flexibility. Not only will you be  able to retain your objectivity while appraising the business process framework, but you will also  get to strategize your decision making curve.

Simply put, even small decisions become  key differentiators that influence your position in the market. For example, your business analytics team can assess the business model you started out with and determine its long-term feasibility. You can accordingly either devise a newer, lean model yourself or go out into the market to discover modifications to add to your existing framework. Either way, you won’t be working with business processes that rigidly sticks to old norms. Moreover, your staff are apprised of how their roles and responsibilities would differ in line with business transformation. Teams can correspondingly upskill ahead of the curve so that their deployments to newer assignments won’t be delayed due to a lack of know-how. Actionable points to draw up here are:

  • A complete enterprise-wide “inventory lookup” that tells you what you do and don’t have in terms of strategy.
  • A centralized knowledge management unit that ties up your business model, goals, old and new information.
  • A thorough documentation of each decision, business case , its justification and alignment on project-specific activities.

The idea here is to determine if the decisions themselves are causing you to invest in the wrong opportunities or  miss the right ones. The next (and final) point will cover how involving senior management reinforces the value of transparency.

Transparent Leadership

When change happens, it affects everyone regardless of their seniority and role within the organization. If your firm’s senior management or Board of Directors make decisions that factor in how change restructures people’s roles and responsibilities, communication can help clarify  the company’s position and the direction of leadership.

For this to happen, a unanimous consensus on communication protocols need to be reached. Mails, while a necessity, does risk cluttering inboxes even if you create different groups. Therefore consider using a software service or messaging platform with the inbuilt option to increase user interaction while unclogging individual schedule streams. Let’s say you’re recruiting new and/or temporary hires for a particular department. If you inform existing teams belonging to that department beforehand of this move,  the right people can fit orientation and subsequent shadowing/training sessions into their schedules without feeling stretched thinly. They can get regular BAU activities done as well as help new faces transition smoothly into work assignments.

What’s more, rather than settling in complacently in one corner of the enterprise, everyone can stay informed of company retreats, team outings and office workshops. They can freely mingle on the floor and get acquainted with one another, right from  the ones who were with you in your early days down to your latest hire!

People are more than just their employee tag. So long as transparency is weaved into both people and processes, a radical business transformation can not only happen but does so with everyone’s acceptance and understanding of why it is needed in today’s digital age!

About the Author

Aakash Gupta heads the Business consulting wing of Saviom Software. As a firm advocate of the best practices for proactive project portfolio management and resource management, he has several publications in the space to his credit. Follow his work, here.