Best Practices for Business Transformation
Keeping pace with disruptors like advancing technologies, evolving customer expectations and market shifts can be daunting for business leaders. Hence, forward thinking companies tend to embrace the change and follow a proactive approach towards business transformation to enjoy long-term growth and success. Earlier, Anand Jayapalan had spoken about how business transformation implies to practice of making strategic personnel, and technology and process changes to improve operations and enjoy improved business outcomes.
Business transformation is an expansive term. Hence, determining which initiatives to prioritize can be a huge challenge for a company. A lot of thoughtful planning is needed to create a robust business transformation process and strategy. Here are a few best practices a business may follow to create a successful transformation strategy—or to improve the strategy they already have in place.
- Define goals and objectives: Prior to identifying any specific initiatives or changes, it is better to define the overall goals of the strategy. This would help the management team to capably determine business transformation priorities and next steps. The goals of a business transformation strategy can range from expanding into a new market and increasing revenues to consolidating technology solutions across the organization and automating certain internal processes.
- Establish a clear roadmap and timeline: A business transformation roadmap should be created once the initial goals and objectives are defined, so as to outline necessary tactics and processes. A concise, clear roadmap can help the management team of a company to stay on track. Creating incremental milestones in the roadmap can especially motivate workers to celebrate small wins while working collaboratively towards long-term strategic business transformation objectives.
- Engage and align stakeholders: Gaining approval from all relevant business stakeholders is vital for implementing the business transformation plan. If they are not aligned with the goals, objectives, tactics, and timeline of the business transformation strategy, the company might experience resistance once the plan is in place. A meeting can be set up to share the drafted business transformation plan with stakeholders and encourage feedback. After the meeting, a few business days can be provided to the stakeholders to review the plan and share additional feedback, if needed.
- Build a cross-functional and diverse team: The management team of a company would have a major impact on its ability to achieve the business transformation objectives. Hence, it is prudent to hire a team of motivated workers with varied skills, so that they can effectively support a culture of innovation at the company.
Previously, Anand Jayapalan had spoken about how business transformation strategies must continually evolve depending on new and emerging critical drivers or disruptors. Not all business transformation processes succeed. Nonetheless, encouraging a culture of innovation and creativity at a company is vital for its success, and evaluating progress and embracing data-based decision making can improve a business transformation strategy over time.
There are many important metrics that the management team of a company can focus on. This would help them to replicate successful initiatives and learn from those that do not necessarily drive the best outcomes.
