6 Critical Steps of Business Transformation Programs
Every organization will have defined strategies to take care of the interests of multiple stakeholders - customers, investors, employees and suppliers. With the ever-changing economy, organizations have to think fast in reinventing their strategies to cope up with the competition. There has to be periodic checkpoints to analyze themselves and answer the following questions
o Am I selling the right products and services?
o Am I sourcing it correctly?
o Am I taking advantage of all available opportunities to increase my market share in the industry?
o Is my customer relationship management efficient enough?
o How am I faring compared to my competition?
o Am I doing my business in the most efficient that increases the productivity of my workforce thereby reducing cost?
There are so many other strategy related questions that time and again, companies to have answer themselves. When the answer to any of the above questions is negative, then there is a need to relook at the way they operate. That is when a business transformation program will be born.
It is always exciting for any company to launch such an initiative, but seldom, is aware of all the challenges and perils that come along with such a program. Going by the statistics, almost 40% of Enterprise Business Transformation programs fail while a good portion of the remaining have significant cost and time over runs.
Having been associated with two transformation programs over the last decade, I have noticed several areas of opportunities which should improve the above numbers. This sequel is to highlight some of the major areas where corporations can do better. Most of them are stating the obvious, but nevertheless is an attempt to reiterate some of the basics. What are they?
o First and foremost, how realistic is your business case?
o Is there proper program governance in place?
o Do you have the right technology to enable the new business processes?
o How robust are your new business processes? Is it old wine in new bottle?
o How flawless is your test strategy?
o The biggest of them all - change management? What is the organization's preparedness?
The above list is not exhaustive, but definitely some of the critical elements of any business transformation program. I want to share my observations around these line items in my subsequent blogs. Stay tuned!
