It can be difficult to get an overview of the whole business and understand how it works, and more importantly, what doesn't work.
Therefore, we think you should make a drawing of what the company looks like today and what the target picture should look like in the future before a major change. We often see that management gets an aha experience when they are given visual tools to discuss, compare and make decisions about important changes and investments. The change journey gets a strong link to reality and anchoring, which increases the likelihood of achieving the desired results with manageable risks.
Your company has processes that are important tools to understand how you interact with customers, partners, suppliers and where costs and profits lie. These processes need to be compared with your business models to ensure they are effective. By using the right business mapping tools, a business can be quickly mapped and maintained over time in a simple and cost-effective way. In a relatively short time, the current situation can be mapped well enough to be powerful in analyzing future scenarios. Pain points and improvement potentials can be added at an early stage and used in analysis and scenario building.
By linking organization, processes, information and systems, we get an overall picture of how business and IT are connected. Our method for this is called Anchor Insight.
The vision statement is a blueprint that makes it easier for you, as a management team, to agree, discuss and make important choices about the future of your business. It is a prerequisite for implementing successful changes by being able to easily communicate the meaning of a change to everyone involved. Showing the objective of the changes helps to create an understanding and establish a positive image of the change process among your employees. It also makes it easier to analyze the size and impact of the changes. We will come back to how we work with objectives in a future article.
It is important to understand the impact and to be able to communicate it when making changes. How will my business be affected if I change my organization? Processes, people and systems interact and their interaction needs to be understood so that the negative consequences are as small as possible. By starting from the vision and the mapping of the business, nothing is missed when making changes and different scenarios can be compared to find the best solution. It is possible to see whether a problem lies in processes (working methods) or systems. In our customer assignments, we have seen situations where companies had good systems but did not work in the right way. The customers wanted to change systems, which we advised against after conducting a survey. By training employees and changing processes, we solved the problems at a significantly lower cost than if they had changed systems. Anchor has also done the opposite; replaced or brought in new systems successfully by mapping and analyzing requirements, future processes and future system landscapes so that the right choice and management could be made. When making major decisions, it is often worth the time to create the various change scenarios that are possible, estimating figures on the constituent parts so that scenarios can be compared with each other. The illustration below shows a simplified example of what this might look like. In scenario A, we replace a system, while in scenario B we focus on changing the organization and training staff. In scenario C, we take a broader approach that supports the company's long-term goals. Using the scenarios, we see that the initial idea of changing a system is the one that provides the lowest goal fulfillment. Given the content of the scenarios, important aspects can then be examined such as cost, time for implementation, complexity to implement, need for training or new hiring, possible benefits of the improvement. Often automation or process improvements are easy to recoup as they lead to a reduced need for labor, which can instead be spent on other tasks. It is important to consider future readiness when making major changes. The scenarios being compared can lead to major transformations with multi-year implementation plans that achieve milestones. The choices you make must be compared against how much benefit the company can expect from the goals in the future. How can you grow with the solution? Can you manage the solution in a cost-effective way?
For major decisions, it is often worth the time to map out and describe the different scenarios of change that are possible, so that the options can be objectively analyzed and compared.
With blueprints of your business, your management team will have a common understanding of what a change involves and who is affected. This will allow you to make better decisions and implement changes faster and more painlessly for your organization.
Welcome to contact us at Anchor and we will show you how we work with drawings as a basis for decision-making with our Insight method.
Hear Dan and Alexander talk about Anchor Insight.
