10 Steps to Minimising Risk for Product or Service Solutions
Regardless of an organisations business model, industry or level of earnings, business risks must be identified as a strategic aspect of business planning. Once risks are identified, organisations take the appropriate Steps to manage them to protect their business assets.
Here are 10 Steps to minimising risk both for products and services
Step 1 – Acknowledge that strategy delivery is just as important as strategy design
Strategy delivery doesn’t just happen automatically once it is designed!
The importance of active and visible leadership cannot be overstated. You invest substantial resources, creative time, and energy in designing the right strategy. You need to give equal priority and attention to delivering it – before you move on to something else. It’s an essential part of one’s role to ensure that your organisation has the program delivery capability it needs to implement one’s strategy.
Step 2 – Accept that one is accountable for delivering the strategy one has designed Do not underestimate!
The orchestration required to succeed in today’s fast-changing and complex business environment is enormous. Once you have defined and clearly communicated the strategy, your responsibility shifts to overseeing the progress of implementation so that the strategy delivers results and achieves its goals.
One needs to know where in your organisation change happens and who manages the programs that drive that change. One is accountable for proactively addressing emerging gaps and challenges that may impact delivery. Without this discipline, rigour, and care, one’s strategy has little chance of success.
Step 3 – Dedicate and mobilise the right resources. Inspire and assign the right people to get the job done!
Actively balance “running the organisation” and “changing the organisation” by selecting and securing the right resources for each – they often have different needs. Recognise that team leadership skills are at a premium, and assign the best leaders with sufficient capacity to tackle head-on the most challenging programs and those essential for successful strategy implementation.
Step 4 – Leverage insight on customers and competitors. Don’t forget to look outside!
Continue to monitor customer needs, collect competitor insight, and monitor the market landscape for major risks, unknowns and dependencies. Advantage in the market flows to those who excel at gaining new insights from an ever-changing business environment and quickly responding with the right decisions and adjustments to both strategy design and delivery.
Step 5 – Be bold, stay focused and keep it as simple as possible. Become smarter, encourage simplicity!
Initiating or rapidly reacting to dramatic changes in the organisation’s environment is an increasingly important capability for success. Many of the delivery challenges you will face will be complex and interdependent. In the face of this, the best way to remain flexible is to surround yourself with simplifiers rather than complicators. One requires people who can get to the core of an opportunity or threat, understand the drivers, deliver the information, and take the action you need in the way you need it. That way, you minimise bureaucracy, explore ideas, take appropriate risks, prioritise work, ensure accountability, and focus on delivering value through your strategic initiatives.
Step 6 – Promote team engagement and effective cross-organisation co-operation Beware of the “frozen middle!”
Gain genuine buy-in from middle and line managers by engaging and activating them as strategy champions rather than just as managers and supervisors. Don’t just assume your people will “get it” – leadership must firmly establish a shared commitment to strategy-delivery priorities and regularly reinforce it. This isn’t the time or place for loafing around. Govern through transparency, trust and enhance cross-business co-operation in delivery.
Step 7 – Demonstrate bias toward decision-making and own the decisions one makes Follow one’s decision through to delivery!
Commit to making strategic decisions rapidly. Move quickly to correct course, reprioritise, and remove barriers. Accept that one is likely not to have all the information you want and rely on those you can trust to deliver sufficient reliable input to allow thoughtful decisions. Consider and address risks explicitly – both upfront and regularly throughout delivery. Build a lean and powerful governance structure to reinforce accountability, ownership, and a bias towards action, based on agreed metrics and milestones.
Step 8 – Check ongoing initiatives before committing to new ones. Resist the temptation to declare victory too soon!
With the right governance, leadership, rigour, and reporting capabilities in place, you can regularly evaluate your portfolio of strategic initiatives. Add new initiatives in response to new opportunities, but first be sure you understand both the existing portfolio and your organisation’s capacity to deliver change. Actively address any issues you discover. In the long term, strategic initiative management discipline – critical for effective orchestration of a dynamic initiative portfolio – will work only if robust assessment, support, and correction are in place.
Step 9 – Develop robust plans but allow for missteps – fail fast to learn fast
Proper planning and preparation prevent poor performance!
The old saying is as true as it ever was, but in today´s organisation environment, strategy planning cycles must be more rapid, dynamic, and agile than in the past. Empower program delivery teams to experiment and learn in an environment where it is safe to fail fast. Discuss challenges openly, and adjust the plan as needed for success. Learn to reward failure, or at least accept it as valuable input.
Step 10 – Celebrate success and recognise those who have done good work
Inspiring people is part of one’s job!
Yes, one has to drive accountability and focus on delivery, but one also needs to motivate those who do the work. Actively shape a winning culture by engaging and exciting the people responsible for delivering strategic change programs. Celebrate successes and quick wins.
Generously and publicly acknowledge those who demonstrate the leadership behaviours and program delivery capabilities that make strategy succeed and ask them to share their experiences.
Should you require further information or assistance with your risk assessment or management, please feel free to contact us.