Business Management and Effective Strategies

Brown claims that since their business model is now being challenged due to the growth of the business, the business model now needs to change. The major challenges that Brown faces in creating a process-orientated organisation are: appointing process owners to maintain processes, transitioning to a new management style, maintaining a process infrastructure, and changing management for the transitioning period. A process owner has responsibilities to maintain a process such as the overall design and implementation. A process owner also needs to take care of the budget for the process and it's performance. This process owner is a senior executive that works in collaboration with other department heads and provides training in the workforce. The challenge is to find candidates that can be process owners and providing them with the required knowledge and resources to maintain a process. Therefore less people and more skill will be required when appointing a candidate. Champy states that: “transformed work often requires fewer but more highly skilled people, whose jobs are now more complex.

Just think of the service representative whose changed job is to solve the customer problem, rather than pass the customer off to another person or push the hold button.”(2006) This could also cause lay-offs and other conflicts involving the change in culture. People are resistant to change and Brown will have to know how to deal with all the conflict. Therefore it is imperative “to know how much study and preparation (mostly planning and training) are required before you execute an operational change.” (Champy 2006) The change in management style will require distributing authority over resources through a collaborative effort. Department heads must negotiate over process and work design, performance metric, and resource allocation. This requires time and can cause conflicts therefore “process change requires getting the pacing right. When design debates occur, you must listen to all the arguments. When all arguments have been heard, however, decisions must be made and change quickly implemented. Knowing when to end the debate and move to action is an art format.” (Campy 2006) The change in management style requires a change in responsibilities and ownership.

Negotiations are made with front-line staff in order to allocate positions and assign roles. This can be a lengthy process and requires co-operation from staff members. An important part is maintaining the process infrastructure. It is important to measure the process performance in order to see how well it is performing and if any changes need to be made. Performers in the process need to be compensated and therefore remuneration will have to be addressed. Resources will have to be allocated in order to train process performers and keep their knowledge updated. Technology is always improving and therefore the process and process performers will have to keep abreast with technological advancements. This can be difficult and time consuming and is a great challenge. Brown faces the challenge of having breadth and depth, having involvement and support having open communication, Infrastructure changes and active change management at all levels.

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The improvement of customer satisfaction is among the top prioritized business goals of the organization. Acknowledging that knowledge about customers. plays a key role in achieving higher customer satisfaction, the organization should consider following a knowledge-oriented approach to tackle this challenge. They will have to receive that kind of knowledge through informal meetings that generate that knowledge through customer interaction. Essentially, a process oriented organisation can be broken down into three parts : Process Management and Measurement – measures that include aspects of the process like output quality, cycle time, process cost and variability compared to the traditional accounting measures. To create such an organisation will require certain criteria: Design and documentation of business processes. A business process begins with a mission objective and ends with reaching of the business objective. Process-oriented organizations break down the walls of structural sectors and try to avoid functional towers.

A business process can be broken down into several processes, which have their own characteristics, but also contribute to achieving the goal of the whole process. The analysis of business processes typically includes the planning of processes and sub-processes down to activity level. Business Processes are designed to add value for the customer and should not include unnecessary activities. The outcome of a well-designed business process is increased effectiveness (value for the customer) and increased efficiency (less costs for the company). Business Processes can be modeled through a large number of methods and systems. Secondly, anything that is done more than once, or by multiple people, should be documented, if for no other reason than consistency. Once a process is documented, it can be monitored, managed, and improved.   Running processes without process documentation is like running programs without the source code.  It works as long as it works, but who can fix it when it doesn't work?  Who can even determine what went wrong. Another requirement is Management commitment towards process orientation. In a process-oriented organization, management needs to support the process program. Without the support of senior managers, the process idea cannot develop to its full potential.

There is a high risk for process management to fail if senior managers do not accept necessary leadership roles and do not encourage process-oriented thinking. Process ownership is also essential. Developing clear business process roles holds direct and indirect benefits for a company. Clear business process roles allow management to direct scarce business resources towards a more clearly defined target knowing that less time, money and effort will be wasted fighting doubt and more resources will be used in reaching company goals. Another requirement is process performance measurement. Muehlen present process management as the collection of planning, organizing and controlling activities for the goal-oriented management of the organization’s value chain regarding the factors quality, time, cost and customer satisfaction (Muehlen, 2004). The main goals of process management are the achievement of clearness with regard to process structure and process influence. In addition, the corporate culture has to be in line with the process technique.

This represents those values that come along with the approach and which need to be adopted by an organization, such as customer orientation, continuous improvement and responsibility. is an ongoing effort to improve products, services, or processes. Another is business process improvement. This can seek step by stem development over time or great development all at once. Lastly, a process-oriented organizational structure is an essential part in the creation. In the functional structure the work is not organized around processes but tasks. On the other hand, a process perspective is customer oriented and involves a horizontal sight of the business that goes across the organizational departments. The process owners have the responsibility to be effective and efficient when running business processes. He or she guides the process team that can function mostly on its own, so the management roles have to change hugely from budget planning and control to guidance and support for divisions. In the case of Pinnacle West, changes were made such as writing down processes and ensuring that they document reality and list the discrepancies and gaps.

They also vowed to not permit anything to be scheduled and assigned to the maintenance crew without it being fully planned. And they will not close the work order until all of these are done (Raghu, 2010). They also tried to change their culture and implement predictive maintenance by providing diagnostic tools at sub-stations. Leaders in each group would meet regularly to collaborate ideas and the culture shift so that it is acceptable for leaders of a group to interact with members of another group. (Raghu, 2010). They Identified process owners for each milestone of the process and designated teams. For continuous improvement, a survey was provided at the end of each work to allow members to give feedback on efficiency and defects. The key challenge is taking the process collaborative and incorporating it into the everyday work. Grassroots strategy can be very effective for businesses in all stages of development. Newly formed businesses benefit from getting their name out, and established businesses benefit from staying on the customer's mind. When branding, or re-branding, a business, grassroots can quickly establish a given image in the customer's mind.

The idea of grassroots is to saturate the community with talk about your business. To do this effectively, you need to keep your business' name in front of people and on their minds. The message you send out needs to be updated often, however, or it will become repetitive and ignored. Keep your message exciting by marketing on a number of levels and combining strategy techniques. The threat to sustainable livelihoods and local, independent businesses is largely driven by anti-competitive practices, policies and arrangements favoring national corporate chains and absentee owners. Indeed, publicly traded, owned corporations that deny people democratic voice and “externalize” social and environmental impacts must be critiqued insofar as they are unable to help communities meet their needs for sustainable livelihoods, reliable social services, and impartial citizen access to income-generating resources. Grassroots pursues people-centered ends directly, not as secondary or minor to the interests of transnational corporations. A common challenge among small business owners is how to go green and be more sustainable with limited resources on a tight budget.

With fewer personnel to accomplish more aggressive competitive advantage goals, small business owners often need to get creative and find local resources to boost sustainability. Together small businesses can make a big impact. Even initiating simple changes can result in saving money which can then be applied to additional projects; first things first, you need a plan. For small business owners looking to increase their competitive advantage by improving grassroots efforts to become greener a long term plan is helpful. When you create a sustainability program that creatively looks at ways for you to boost brand recognition and customer loyalty while at the same time promoting sustainable practices at the office and in the community you create a program with a momentum that will only increase over time. Sustainability in business is often thought of as a large multinational corporate practice. But with the wide spread use of social media and hand held devices keeping customers connected virtually all the time, your sustainability efforts can make a big impact as you use social media to actively engage your target market with you in your process to become greener.

Getting started with small projects can help initiate authentic employee and community engagement. Aligning your company with other community sustainability efforts can impact the wider community in positive ways and inspire other small businesses to make meaningful efforts to improve sustainable business practices. In tough economic times every small business needs to be careful how they allocate funds. Because many sustainability practices can begin with little to no expenditure, savings begin to feed the program and an increase in profitability is realized. When customers begin to spread the word through business reviews, blog responses, and twitter feeds, your company will gain brand recognition and client base which in turn helps to bring about additional sustainability improvements. With a little planning, goal setting, and community connection, your grassroots sustainability program will be ready to improve your competitive advantage for years to come. Although it seems that pushing the agenda from the top down is effective due to senior managers having to first transform their mental models of management before they engage in the process, it is very limited.

An organisation that is learning should always take employees on board before any transformation. If not, training costs will eventually increase due to the top down strategy and it will take a while to even out the bad. The top down strategy has longer sales cycles before they can show any pull. The top down agenda also causes the value of the process to be justified only at the top. While in the bottom-up agenda everybody has to buy in every day. This will cause the agenda to go viral and not be stagnant.

The development of the process life cycle will be reiterated less with the top-down agenda. In the top-down agenda companies recognize this model more while the bottom-up agenda seems somewhat new and radical. Start-ups are coming out with bottom up agendas and business models because these are the strategies younger entrepreneurs are familiar with. Young entrepreneurs look at older models in a bad light because they themselves don’t like the idea of being forced to do something in a specific way, and they want to bring innovation (both in terms of ideas and business models) to the table. It’s a movement that will continue to grow, and will be interesting to follow.

Bibliography:
Champy, James: “People and Processes”. March 2006. ACM Queue.Web. 10 February 2013 Zur Muehlen M.: “Organizational Management in Workflow Applications”. Information Technology and Management journal. 2004. Kluwer Academic Publishers.Web.12 February 2013. T.S.Raghu: “Creating a Process-Oriented Enterprise at Pinnacle West”. Version (A). HBSP Document 810E02. 2010-02-05. Richard Ivey School of Business, The University of Western Ontario.Web. 8 February 2013.

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