In my last post, I touched, briefly, why being responsive to business environment events and feedbacks will enable any business to maintain its competitive advantage. In this post, I want to introduce the four main steps that one need to take to ensure the enterprise is effectively filtering the right event and have the capability to respond to the events as fast as possible.
I tried to organize the steps from the easiest to implement to the most complex one. Each one of those steps requires leveraging technologies and implementing new business processes. The change management process associated with introducing new solutions and changing process is the cause for the complexity of implementation.
1) Define and publish all functions needed to reach business goals
First and foremost the company needs to define all the functions required to reach the company goals. Each “function” must be defined very clearly. A clear definition of a “function” required a description of the “function” purpose ( must derive from the company purpose), assets the function requested to manage and a list of all the function’s responsibilities. On top of that, any “function” needs to capture and maintain all interaction with other functions. Interactions between functions are not defined by most organizations today, although they are crucial for running a better responsive organization.
After functions defined, people should be assigned to fill all described functions. One important rule to remember is that a company shouldn’t have the same function defined twice.
All functions, their purpose, assets, and responsibilities as well as the person who fill it, should be publicly available to all members of the company. Anyone can use this data to search for who is responsible for what.
2) Automate all processes related to motivate, operate and organize individuals and teams.
This step is not related to the business processes that your organization should defind and follow. What we encourage is the automation of all the processes associated with how people are motivated, working together and organize. These processes are manual today and therefore are subject to biases. Manual processes and rigid hierarchies also make the below processes slower than they need to be.
Identifying when functions struggling, setting up prioritization, getting feedbacks on functions progress toward goals and objectives, hiring people, separating people from the organizations, taking vacation, going to training, Personal and Professional Development, benefits, promotions, ensure teams are working together, self awareness, all of those are few examples of processes that can be automated and as a result create a better responsive organization.
3) Create near real-time conflict awareness and conflict resolution
The ability to raise a conflict at any time is crucial for streamline processes within organizations. But, much more important is the ability to rout conflicts into a near real-time conflict resolution process that can resolve the disputes as fast as possible.
4) Receive events/feedbacks from external/internal environments, filter the impacting ones, and route them to the right functions
Establishing feedback loops and identifying environmental events the business need to respond to are the first step to be able to receive feedbacks and events. This ability required a fair understanding of your business environment, your value chain, and your customers. There is a limitation to the number of feedback loops and events a business can process, so this process is always going on. Business
Prioritizing feedbacks and events is crucial for any organization due to the number of events and feedbacks that will be captured and the internal resources available to process and respond to those events. There aren’t any golden rules here. Each organization should define its own prioritization and implement a mechanism to prioritize events and feedbacks. The prioritize events and feedbacks need to be sent as soon as they received and prioritized to the right internal functions that manage the resources or have defined
Once a function respond to an event, there is a need for continuous and more often feedbacks to verify if the response helped or the function need to pivot and response differently.
5) Establish efficient, durable and real-time communication between individuals and teams
Imagine a communication engine that knows how to filter the data and knowledge sent to you by others in your organization from all the clutter you are getting. A communication engine that is always up and running (no matter what) and route you the right messages based on the current functions that you are filling.
What organizations need today is a communication platform with the purpose of streamlining interaction between functions within a company to enable fast response to external (or internal) events and feedbacks. This communication platform should be different from the current communication platform with the goal of increasing data sharing of any type between people.
We created Galaxies to find technical solutions for each one of the above steps.