Moving on Up – How you can prepare for business recovery
Governance.Business Start&Go Webinar Series | PT
July 7, 2020
Transformación digital. Descubre cómo aplicarla para seguir creciendo | Webinar
September 25, 2020
Organisations are starting to see signs of business recovery and are getting used to operating within the ‘new normal’.
Organisations are starting to see signs of business recovery and are getting used to operating within the ‘new normal’. Confidence might be a little fragile, which is perfectly understandable, however, as we saw after the last financial crisis, it is the bold organisations that look to build for the future with an eye for innovation and a desire to continuously improve that will experience growth and prosper.
It is time to look at the way your business operates. Gartner refers to it as The Reset. You have responded to the initial impact of the crisis, and now it is time to accelerate the recovery mode. Creating plans to provide a platform on which to strengthen and scale as you adapt and align to new strategic business goals and enhance your business continuity plans.
Whilst bringing new, high quality, products and services to market is the stimulus for growth this has to be supported by having a business recovery plan that focuses on refining your operational processes and upgrading your systems to enable you to be more efficient and productive. This gives your organisation greater business resilience and the platform for growth without escalating operating costs. If you are still reliant on a combination of low-cost software, with limited functionality, and spreadsheets – requiring manual intervention to transfer data – then now is the time to do something about it and avoid the frustrations you will feel as you scale.
by Gartner
Leadership challenges
There are bound to be leadership challenges in doing this. People are typically reluctant to change, unless their current ways of working are causing significant problems. Achieving a good level of user adoption to any new system requires excellent onboarding and good communication. The transition has to be properly planned, and the business benefits explained. Perhaps the most important benefits to communicate are the ‘what’s in in for me’ for each of the roles using the new systems. Where possible consider integrated solutions that will replace numerous point solutions. The value delivered by modern integrated systems in reducing the amount of duplication of data entry into disparate systems is not to be underestimated, both in terms of time spent, and the opportunity for human error. Having a single version of the truth with timely information, and consistency in data capture and processes, not only increases productivity but also facilitates better reporting and dashboards which in turn enables improved decision-making. There can also be good cost savings achieved from the elimination of multiple software contracts and the reduction in effort maintaining complex spreadsheets.
Leaving the disparate systems & spreadsheets behind
Setting up new systems can be time consuming and cause disruptions. As part of the project you should take the opportunity to refine your processes. Better automation of a poor process is no good for anyone. Where possible, always look for solutions that come preconfigured with out of the box ‘best’ practices and reports that reduce the implementation timescales and improve your time to value. One of the most time-consuming activities in getting a new system up and running is often data migration. Too many software packages fail to offer good facilities to support this, resulting in time wasted rekeying the data, and validating in accuracy and completeness.
InovaPrime’s latest release of the Governance.Business solution, version 5.3, has included the ability to upload data to all of the data entities via an Excel import, which could save you hours of work. With its broad range of functionality that covers:
- Strategic financial planning
- Sales management
- Portfolio, Resource, and Project/Product management
- Service management
- Knowledge & Document management
many point solutions can be eliminated and ways of working enhanced.
With Product/Service innovation being essential to remain competitive and fast time to market necessary to retain and increase market share, operating on inadequate systems and spreadsheets cannot be sustainable. Customer expectations continue to grow, and technological advancements mean that remaining with the status quo will result in profits falling and an increased likelihood of customers churning. So being bold and moving on up to better systems and processes that help you to mitigate risk and support your business growth has to be the way forward to succeed as we emerge into the post pandemic world.
