Business Process Strategy

Small Business Process Strategy is the heart of your long-term digital transformation plan for your business.

What is a Small Business Process Strategy?

How do we define process strategy?

Gartner defines business process as an event-driven, end-to-end processing path that starts with a customer request and ends with a result for the customer.  Business processes often cross departmental and even organizational boundaries.

Now add the strategy plan to the process.  A strategic plan typically is a technology plan with a security mindset to align an organization goals, mission and objectives over a three-to-five-year period.

We cannot lay out an exact business process strategy for your organization.  Every organization contains or owns their secret sauce.  However, this article provides some thoughts and insights to a process focused strategy.

7 Key Small Business Strategic Processes

These seven processes will provide a foundation for a process-focused strategy.  Once you’ve put these in place, the most important next step is to execute.

Just like in sports, the best teams contain talented people, talented players, good coaching, good direction and good culture all stems from the importance of process strategy.

Great processes build a great business direction and culture.

Customer Strategy

The most important process strategy depends on small business customer relationships.  How do you track customer relationships?  The bottom-line is no customers no business.

Here are some important aspects of a customer process strategy:

• Listen to your Customer
• Add Value to their World
• Personalize your Offering
• Find a Channel to Connect
• Regular Communication
• Measure Engagement
• Utilize Surveys and Polls

Employee On-Boarding

How does a new hire come on-board to your organization?  Do you set expectations?  As your new employee steps into the new role, do they have a clear idea of what success looks like?

As you grow and hire new employees, your strategy needs to include the following:

• Defined Role – Clearly defined role of what the employee will be accomplishing.
• Training – Create a training program that sets the employee up for success.
• Checkpoints – Milestones and check in points to make sure your employee is on track.
• Metrics – Know the expected results for each role.

Now comes the question, how does technology help with this?

• First of all, create forms to capture the onboarding information that will feed into your systems.
• Next build videos and training material that contains feedback questions and content
• Then setup checkpoint sessions to review with the new hire what they learned from the training content
• Finally, implement a dashboard measuring day to day results

During the training process ask for feedback along the way.

Employee Off-Boarding

What happens when an employee leaves voluntarily or involuntarily?  Do you have a plan to disable their access?  Who is taking over their duties?

As you grow, every role needs a backup.  If the onboarding is done right, this process should go really smooth and protect your company from an insider risk event.

Risk Management

What are your plans to mitigate risk?  Do you know what your risks are?

Here are four plans you need to implement at a minimum for a strong business process strategy.  In the heat of a disaster or catastrophic event, the last thing you want to figure out is your plan of action.

• Business Continuity Plan
• Disaster Recovery Plan
• Risk Management Plan
• Incident Response Plan

The importance of process strategy for risk boils down to knowing what action to take in a critical situation.

Governance

Why do you need governance?  Does this stifle flexibility and innovation of a company?

Governance is really the structure of rules, practices and processes used to control and protect your business direction.  With the correct processes and practices in place, your company will meet regulation requirements.

Without some governance in place, your company will become the wild west without the proper control and guidance.  So, make sure you add governance to your business process strategy.

Technology

Why do I need a life-cycle technology process?  Are you adopting technology that can improve the efficiency of your business processes?

Remember technology changes over time.  Your end user computer devices do not last forever and can hinder work productivity.

You might not need to worry about the latest blockchain technology, but you should be paying attention to automation technology enhancements and features for your small business IT strategy.

Customer Support Strategy

Our thoughts and focus start with the customer and end with the customer.  From the beginning sales process to post delivery, a customer strategy needs to include supporting them for the long term.

 

Final Thoughts

We live in a digital changing world.  Businesses evolve over time.  The businesses that survive are the ones that adapt.

The days of pen and paper are disappearing.  Eliminating that in your business will have a positive impact on the environment and improve the efficiency of your business process strategy.

If you want to learn more about the resources and plans for Cloudz Biz, check us out here.