Tag: small business

Communicating Strategy From the Bottom

http://blogs.hbr.org/2014/06/strategy-isnt-what-you-say-its-what-you-do/

Came across the log post about strategy implementation and I think it’s a good one for consultants working with senior management teams. It goes along the lines of walking the talk.

“Strategic choice-making cascades down the entire organization, from top to bottom. This means that every person in the company has a key role to play in making strategy. Performing that role well means thinking hard about four things:

1) What is the strategic intent of the leaders of the level above mine?
2) What are the key choices that I make in my jurisdiction?
3) With what strategic logic can I align those choices with those above me?
4) How can I communicate the logic of my strategy choices to those who report to me?

If you as a manager can do the first three of these four, then you will own your choices and own your strategy. If you do the fourth, you will set up your subordinates to repeat these four things and thereby own their choices and their strategy, and pass on the task to the next layer of the company. If each successive layer assumes this level of ownership, the organization can make its bosses’ statement a real strategy rather than an empty slogan.”

I can personally say that these points are all very important to infuse into the culture of your company. Both from my Wells Fargo experience where these are deeply ingrained in the corporate culture to the smaller scale of my own company, clearly communicated strategy is the key.
When not only your direct reports, but your two downs are spreading the gospel, you will be successful.

If you need help getting your team to walk the talk, I’m happy to help.

Business Strategy with Analytics – Aligning a business strategy to drive an organization forward requires a robust analytics solution. Businesses who have good analytics tend to be much more profitable and efficient then ones that do not. DMAIPH has helped dozens of companies in both the U.S. and the Philippines with adding more data analysis in their business strategy. Contact DMAIPH now at analytics@dmaiph.com or connect with me directly to find out what we can do to help you align your business strategy with analytics.

 

DMAI – The Intelligent Small Business Outsourcing Solution

Over the past couple of years I have successfully consulted and partnered with a number of small call centers based in the Philippines. Most of my assistance has come in the form of analytics training and consulting, with a focus on making more data-driven decisions and optimizing reporting processes.

I’ve drawn a lot on my experience working with outsourcing projects while with Wells as well as the glorious failure or my own outsourcing company BPO Elite. And now to add to those, the amazing success we have having with DMAI in managing the rapid growth of a 40+ person outsourcing team of consisting of both home and office based staff.

Armed with these experiences and guided by a gifted management team, DMAI is now on the active look for more small business clients. We specialize in providing talent with above average analytical skills, who have been trained to make data-driven decision and are passionate about their work. The caliber of DMAI team members is not what you typically find in a call center employee.

We want to partner with a few more small or medium sized business who are looking to add staff overseas to complement their domestic operations. If you know someone looking to get started or is unhappy with their current outsourcing arrangement, maybe we are the partner they need.

Please Like us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/dmaiph to see what our team members and customers say about DMAI.

You can also follow my blog at http://www.dmaph.wordpress.com to learn more about our mission and purpose… to empower better decision-making through analytics.

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For a free consultation, please connect with us via the above channels or send an email to analytics@dmaiph.com

Outsourcing Tip > Make NASA Jealous! Ensure You Have A Smooth Launch Of Your Outsourcing Efforts

The final area that I have seen countless outsourcing efforts fall short is in having a smooth launch. You have put so much time into sizing the opportunity, negotiating the contract, finding the right people, acquiring the technology you need and building a technique playbook, but you aren’t done yet. You still need to roll it out.

When it comes to outsourcing, there is one thing I have never, ever seen. And that is a full delivery of services, exactly as required on target and without any glitches.

Here are a few keys to ensuring that you go live and avert as many potential disasters as possible.
• First of all, have a risk minded person involved. Someone who is great at looking at something and then coming up with a laundry list of things that can go wrong. And then most importantly, have them in charge of eliminating or mitigating the risks.
• Second, have your processes, the workflow, escalation procedures, and other important documents in writing for the team. No battle plan survives first contact unscathed, but the battle will go much better with one.
• Third, brief everyone. Have a pre-kick off meeting, do a walk through, run lots of tests. Do whatever you can to mimic production so that people get used to having to make decisions just like they will when things are live.
• And finally, hapollo11ave a plan to celebrate. Let everyone know what awaits them if they pull everything off. Give them an extra reason to go an extra step. Everyone wants to be part of a winning team enjoying the celebration of a new start.

That is just a few ideas of what you can do to ensure your launch go as smooth a NASA’s putting a man on the moon!

Analytics Outsourcing – DMAIPH has successful set up Filipino analytics teams for over a dozen U.S. based businesses. Offering both virtual and office based teams that specialize in problem solving using data, new technology and analytics techniques is our strength. Finding and empowering analytics talent is increasingly challenging, but we have it down to a science. Contact DMAIPH now at analytics@dmaiph.com or connect with me directly to learn more about how to set up an analytics-centric team in the Philippines.

 

Back to Basics – Part 2: Analytics Lead To Data-Driven Decision Making

540Of all the lessons I have learned this past year, one that definitely rings truest is that people who use data in their decision-making always come out on top. Having spent 15 years in an amazingly successful company, it became obvious to me that almost everything being done in the bank has a lot of planning and thought behind it. And much more often than not the planning was both strategically and tactically guided by mountains of data. When I left Wells, there are 30-40 analytics postings on any given day, I just looked recently and there were 120 job postings requiring analytics skills.

Now having spent close to two years working with a wide range of other businesses as a consultant, its clear to me that few businesses have the same will to use data in decision-making. It takes a lot of foresight, tons of planning, and huge amounts of discipline to really get a handle on the data in your business, and very few smaller business are able to develop an analytics culture.

That the 2nd reason behind founding BPO Elite. I identified that the talent gap growing quickly when it comes to analytics training (the first) and I also identified the lack of strong analytics cultures in most businesses (the second). So we set up BPO Elite to train and place talent with these companies in dire need to better analytics.

I am helping a friend prepare a new product he is going to launch for his consulting business. On the surface it seems like a great idea with a decent sized market that should fairly easily make a decent revenue stream. But what does the data say? How big is the market really? What is the ideal price to make the product profitable? How best to market it to the target demographic? Most business leaders take a few hours to conduct actual research and then dive in and start spending money on marketing and product development. And this is where so many go wrong. They never looked deep enough to find the data to answer these questions with a more scientific certainty. So that is where I come in.

Empowering small businesses to make more data-driven decisions is where it all started!