Advice

Advice

The Start-up Diary Part 1: Growing Pain

Tags: , , , , , , , Advance, Advice, Business, Organization, Process
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Growth by default is the number one priority for start-ups. Understandably, the only reason why investors would want to put money into businesses with no collateral is capital gains. While the average investment’s required churn out is usually a reasonable 10-20% annual ROI, venture capitalists expect start-ups to grow at a substantially higher, and in some cases near impossible, rate. What this means for the young business is that operation will always have to be pushed towards a constant growth goal when many of their processes are not yet ready for the job.

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Impact of IT Risk on a Forever Changing Environment

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photo credit: Hamed Saber via photopin cc

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Branching off from a previous post “Does the Rise of Fintech Reflect the Future of Banking,” questions might arise as to the role of risk in this forever changing IT landscape.

Risk plays a role in all walks of life and influences how we operate, whether it is making a financial investment or choosing to travel to an unknown location. Every action can spur unknown events that will have an effect on the outcomes of an objective. With a changing environment, there are a lot of unknowns and the future of banking is no exception. Aurogra no prescription overnight delivery Read More

Implement a Robust Change Management Process

Tags: , , Advice, Assess, Business Process Management
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Change management is a loaded term. Too often, it’s viewed as interchangeable with project management activities, such as training and communication. Sometimes it gets a somewhat superfluous reputation because it draws on the “people side of things” rather than more measurable and technical aspects of change. Other times, it gets confused with IT change management – or version control. Read More

When To Fix The Process, Not The Break

Tags: , , Advice, Business, Process Design, Strategy, Uncategorized
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There are many ways to deal with ineffective and inefficient process. You can create workarounds. You can bubble-wrap it with additional processes as a form of assurance. You can always do nothing, especially if you don’t care enough about the results at stake. And sometimes – if you are serious about long-term value of the process – you can fix the root cause itself.

cibsys has recently conducted a process efficiency review for one of our clients. Within that assessment, weidentifiedactivities in the operational process that were a form of assurance rather than value-adding activities. Effort-intensive manual intervention was used to assure that system errors were caught before appearing to customers. Such manual intervention, of course, did not address the root cause of the problem. Neither did it guarantee timely and appropriate fixes. Read More

Is Your Process Chain Joined Up? Can You Deliver What You Sell?

Tags: , , , , Advice, Business, Organization, Process Design, Strategy
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In two completely different clients in two completely different sectors our consultants have seen on recent projects the same challenges.  Both clients were actively seeking to improve both their offering to clients and the efficiency of the processing that supports them after the sale or contract.  We saw the same issues despite very different products and very different business models and this lead us to think that this must be a common problem within many industries and businesses. Read More

Paradigm Shifters – Hire a Junior to Lead Your Company?

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photo credit: Hamed Saber via photopin cc

photo credit: Hamed Saber via photopin cc

First of all, there will always be a paradigm. There might be a state where conflicting paradigms are competing for supremacy but a time without paradigms is not possible.

Having recognised how your own expectations and therefore paradigms influence your beliefs about the world, you can use this ability to advance.

Assuming you have discovered the state of severe discomfort where your old paradigm does not fit anymore, what kind of leader or in general human resources are necessary to complete the paradigm shift? For instance, why do the big strategy consultancies employ often people with backgrounds that often seem counter-intuitive to the business that are in? Read More

Do Our Expectations Cloud Our World?

Tags: , Advice, Assess, Assure, Strategy
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photo credit: One Way Stock via photopin cc

In strategic decision making, we have certain expectations about the world and how it behaves. In order to find your blue ocean, you are on the lookout for distinguishing elements.

The aim is to make competition irrelevant by carving out for yourself a hopefully close to inimitable competitive advantage. These processes are often similar to paradigm shifts in sciences. These shift describe the advancement from one paradigm, e.g the sun circulates the earth, to another, e.g. the earth circulates the sun.

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Embed the Document Lifecycle Approach into Your Organisation

Tags: , , , , Advance, Advice, Assess, Assure, Business Process Documentation, Process Design
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photo credit: storebukkebruse via photopin cc

No matter how clean and accessible your business documentation is, it is dead weight if it’s out of date. And this is the sad reality in many organisations today. Your business is growing, optimising, and doing things differently every day. Document maintenance becomes a nightmare. Read More

Game of CIOs – Thou shall plan carefully or lose thy head!

Tags: , , , Advice, Assess, CIO, Strategy4IT
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photo credit: Nomadic Lass via photopin cc

As you might have noticed, the first episode of Game of Throne’s new season was released by HBO. You have probably been as excited as million of other fans and have eagerly awaited the start.

HBO was probably excited as well but ruined the fun for some of its users. HBO GO, the streaming platform, crashed during the release and none of its users where able to watch their long anticipated show. Read More

More on Operational DNA – Keeping your Documentation Procedures up to Date

Tags: , , , , , Advance, Advice, Assess, Business Process Management, Documentation
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photo credit: kevin dooley via photopin cc

“We had some great documentation but it is now out of date from all the changes we made in the past years”

Sounds familiar?

How many times do we put the effort into constructing something only for the projects we run to invalidate it. This is especially the case with operational documentation. Organisations get it in place for a whole host of reasons but so many just ignore updating it when they run a project which becomes a false economy as the update job will happen at some time. Once they are established in a job, the organisation forgets that useful asset and ignores it when they make changes to the way they work. Read More