5 Simple Ways for Enterprises to Stay Ahead in 2018
In the midst of unprecedented technological innovation, there are five simple ways to manage work and resources to achieve business transformation and deliver strategic value.
- Be Lean
This is not about a gym membership. It’s time to incorporate Lean principles into your work life. Lean businesses are relentlessly focused on continuous improvement, building empowered teams who strive to deliver ever more customer value. They visualize workflow and limit work in progress to identify critical resource bottlenecks, focus efforts on strategic outcomes, and evolve their processes to deliver more value faster. “Adopting Lean principles can create a more focused, responsive, and efficient organization,” said Jon Terry, Planview chief evangelist for Lean-Agile strategy. “But to get these benefits, enterprises have to move beyond spreadsheets into more effective collaboration tools.” - Get more done
According to Harvard Business Review, “Resources are often trapped in unproductive uses … Only 20 % of managers say their organizations do a good job of shifting people to support strategic priorities.” The challenge is getting visibility into both high-priority initiatives and their supporting projects, as well as the day-to-day work efforts required to run the business. Combining this work into a single view allows for efficient and informed decisions for applying resources to the highest priority work. Your success will be measured by how easy you make it for others to get the right work done. - De-clutter to make room for true digital transformation
A strategic approach to managing your organization’s global business applications can not only provide visibility, but also reduce application redundancies, streamline enterprise-wide processes, and reduce overall technical risk. Create a closer alignment with IT by treating your business applications like “resources.” That way you can manage them against existing “work” to make sure you actually deliver on initiatives instead of distracting from them. - Connect to what matters
The complexity of connected products ushers us into an era where manufacturers are waking up as technology organizations. Understanding the dependencies between projects, products, services, and applications is critical to beating the competition and getting to market on time. Let’s face it, if one piece of the puzzle is delayed, so is your revenue. Bring together IT, product development, and professional services to map out and visualize the connections in order to proactively identify potential risks and opportunities. - Plan for success
According to an IDG Research Services survey, 85 % of CIOs and IT leaders said their organizations deviate from the approved annual plan several times a year to meet new internal and external business requests. However, one-third of these IT departments are still measured on, and held accountable for, annual plan goals with no consideration for these additional demands. It’s time to shift to continuous planning to turn your quickly outdated annual strategic plan into an actionable plan. This enables you to adapt and react to new information from your organization and beyond.
If you follow these five steps, you will be well-positioned to help your organization prioritize, advance, and, simply, get work done, says Planview, an Austin, Tex., outfit that provides the industry’s most comprehensive solutions for strategic planning, portfolio and resource management, product innovation, capability and technology management, Lean and Agile delivery, and collaborative work management.