To help you develop your business Summer list of renewal, I thought it would help if I gave you a few tips to get you started. See below:

• Revisit your business plan: review your business plan to see if you there are area that need to be revamped.
• Review your fees: check the fees that you charge clients and compare them to your competitors to see if you need to make an adjustment.
• Research creative financing: if you feel that you need additional funds flowing through your business, then you may find that looking at creative financing is the way to go. Look into angel investors or accepting a business partner.
• Regular client meetings: check-in with your clients on a regular basis to make sure that their needs are being met. Make sure you keep a list of what you do for your clients and and also things that you feel that your client may need in the future.
• Reassess the bottom-line for your business: analyze your budget to determine if you have any wholes in it. Check to make sure that it not only includes investing back into your business or paying bills, also remember to pay yourself.

Hopefully this list will help you get started in preparing your business renewal plan for the Summer. If you have already created your own business renewal plan, I would love to hear of some things that have planned.

Post from: EveryJoe

Business Me Time: Preparing for Summer

Funny how collaboration and communication, in and of themselves, are viewed by some as “strategies”

Even in blogging you must have content that is interesting, valuable if you will, before people will blog with you. Without the valuable content, or reason to interact with a blog, you have nothing. Watch for empty claims of increasing “collaboration” and “communication”! Stick to your guns and make sure you are doing something that is valuable with these tools.

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Post from: EveryJoe

Is Collaboration and Communication Enough?

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Mr. Coates: Basically I find that people like to be involved in “strategy stuff” – it’s fun like marketing. I also find that when people get together to “do” strategy they generally come to the table each with their own agenda – they know what the strategy should be and secretly want to convince others that their ideas are the best (for example I rarely meet CEO’s who admit that they really need help with strategy or that they don’t have strategy in place). So, I find that the starting place for good strategy development is with processes I use to identify key issues across the organization and then force prioritization – this tends to bring people together as they can begin to see how their colleagues view the organization. It also lays the foundation for whatever “ideas” are later selected as the prioritized goals – prioritized goals must align with prioritized issues in general – at a minimum.

PM411: The prioritizing-of-issues process sounds very good- mirrors a process at the PMO/governance board level in relation to projects- project portfolio management prioritization. You talk a little about execs learning about each others issues/processes/challenges- the Goldratt Viable Vision process has an executive workshop that was called a “4X4″: 4 days of executives doing nothing but presenting/discussing their respective operations to each other. This way you get a more level field to play on; the next 4 days are spent putting together a strategy tree and prioritizing strategies, tactics, and projects. There are obviously a lot more details in the process- one of them being applying the Theory of Constraints to the process (again, Eli Goldratt).

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What is your strategy development process? Is your CEO unable to admit he or she needs help with it? Is it necessary to first “level the field” by learning about each executive’s organizational issues and challenges?

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Post from: EveryJoe

Barriers to Strategy Development: Admitting You Need Help and Issue Prioritization

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Mr. Coates: I have been working with organizations on an integrated process of strategy development through online software for execution management. I find that, as with some of the other commenters, that – aside from ensuring that strategy itself is of value – the critical problems for organizations is the willingness of management to embed disciplined execution processes into the organization – software and such can help but in the end it’s the discipline of having everyone accountable for consistent tracking and exception-based reporting.

I got involved in all this coming from the perspective of having run and invested in and having been on the Boards of a number of emerging growth and other larger companies and nonprofits. I felt that what was lacking was a truly systemic approach that:

1. Involves Board, Management and lower staff as appropriate,

2. Focuses on the entire process from strategy development to execution – and that cascades the strategy process down into the organization – so that lower level planning follows a “strategic” process (this builds alignment and trust),

3. Uses online software for exception-based tracking (I have created a number of solutions that are very simple for implementation teams compared to large performance management systems)

4. Embeds all the history of the process so that new members of the team/board can understand how the organization got to where it is and

5. Employs an annual audit process so that strategy management is part of the ongoing Board oversight and management reporting rather than a one-time event.

PM411: The “focus on the entire process” and “history of the process” points really jump out for me. As to linking strategies to tactics and then the projects to accomplish the tactics, have you been exposed to Eli Goldratt’s Viable Vision process? I know a little about it and like the strategy tree approach (also called strategy mapping by some). I’ve used a strategy mapping approach (first overall goals that are fed by strategies that are fed by tactics) in selling and scoping large business solution projects- it always seems to be something that executives rarely do and is key to aligning projects with strategies.

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How do you feel about technology enabling the strategy process? Do you agree that the real problem is the discipline to do the process or are some processes just too difficult to do without technology? Why is a standardized strategy development process often overlooked? Is it because it is not considered “operational”? Get involved in the discussion! Share YOUR expertise.

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Post from: EveryJoe

Barriers to Strategy Development: Willingness of Management to Embed Processes

Collaboration reaps many benefits but there are still many frustrations with the process and with the technology. Manufacturing Business Technology magazine reports on a survey of just over 400 (about 1/2 design engineers and 1/2 production/project managers) about collaboration as it relates to design and manufacturing improvements.

Only 20% were “satisfied” with current collaboration efforts citing two key areas of frustration:

1. Slow responses from those to whom communications are sent.

2. Clarity of communication.

90% regularly collaborate with internal to company people with only 30% going outside to customers and suppliers on a regular basis. This surprised the reviewers but seems to make sense given intellectual property concerns. These types of realities also create caution when sending design files to production because of difficulties protecting files from changes and making sure the right version is out there.

In spite of the frustrations there is general agreement that collaboration is improving and that there are many benefits to doing it- key among them being:

1. Reduced design and manufacturing errors.

2. Increased product quality.

All of this seems to point more to the value of standardizing processes and the technology that enables them. In fact the article reveals that engineering and production/project management tend to use different systems and processes. This is an age old “siloing” issue borne out of the “need” to hoard information until it is useful to reveal it. In other words, it is NOT a technology problem, it is a people problem.

Once again, centralizing projects related to multiple departments under the guidance of a PMO-like organization could clearly benefit companies collaboration efforts. Leaving it to IT alone to sort out the mess is not a solution- a channel from projects to tactics to strategies that involves an executive level board fed by a supportive PMO can attack the two key issues of slow response and lack of clarity in communications.

How do you view collaboration? Is it more of a people problem or a technology problem? Have you solved the collaboration issue with an innovative business model? Share it!

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Post from: EveryJoe

Collaboration Update: Engineers and Production

Miki Saxon’s post in her Leadership Turn blog about a new book called EPIC Change by Timothy Clark got my attention. There’s no use trying to summarize it except to say that “EPIC” stands for Evaluation, Preparation, Implementation and Consolidation; read her excellent post for more. Then get ready to deal with change if you want to survive as an executive. My comment to her post is repeated below:

Miki- nice post about a book from an author with credibility built from his plant manager experience. There is nothing like a manufacturing environment to give you experience with change, whether it’s simply an increased rate of the same type of process (customer order change rate) or a complete makeover of business processes. His looking-outside-the-market approach is what many innovative companies have set up a standardized research process for, using an organization like a PMO, to at first lead it and then present justified, strategy-aligned, projectized innovations to top executives. I compare the degree of change, and therefore degree of preparation required, to surfing in that small, ridable waves are giving way to large less certain waves that can hurt or drown you. You’ve got to be prepared with more and better “equipment” and a higher level of skill. Interestingly, good big wave surfing conditions are called “EPIC” but few can ride them.

Do you agree that dealing with change, through standardized business processes, is necessary to survive as an executive? as a company? What evidence do you have that the degree of change is increasing? What is different about this change versus the type of change 10 years ago? How do you and your company deal with change?

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Post from: EveryJoe

Surf Conditions Are EPIC, But Can You Ride the Waves?