Resource Fluidity

One of the most common mistakes made by founders and product developers is building something that they thought people would want, only to find out that their assumptions were wrong.

Given ongoing challenges of disruption, some S&OP processes may be constrained while other elements are proven essential to planning with agility. One of the key benefits of S&OP is collaboration across functional areas of the organization. Anaplan and Tata Steel discuss the importance of aligning strategy and execution to increase revenue for the business while leveraging S&OP to navigate uncertainty.

Some parts of the sharing economy took a big hit during the pandemic. But businesses sharing with other businesses is poised to be an incredibly lucrative model for the future.

Most innovation managers know that few of their initiatives will succeed, so they keep multiple projects running at the same time and create processes for quickly separating winners from losers. One popular way to make decisions about what stays and what goes is the use of stage gates. Yet, even with stage gates, firms struggle to kill bad projects. The authors undertook a decade-long review of the product development portfolio at former handset maker Sony Ericsson. They found that that the conventional use of stage gates can actually be part of the problem, impeding project discontinuation in counterintuitive ways.

Over the past 12 months, the COVID-19 crisis has forced business leaders to double down on cost management, ensure liquidity, and scrutinize budgets. Apart from prompting short-term contingency measures—such as cutting back on marketing budgets or IT projects—the lockdowns have spurred cost reductions. Just consider the dramatically lower spending on travel that has accompanied the shift from physical meetings and events to virtual ones.

Many organizations find themselves in a perpetual state of crisis and rely on company “heroes” to put out the fires. While many people love the feeling of saving the day, it shouldn’t be a way of life. If you’ve wondered why your organization performs well in a crisis but struggles otherwise, it may be time to pause and ask why. Your heroes may actually be revealing that you have a deeper problem. The author offers four ways to move away from a culture of perpetual crisis. First, understand that heroism is not a sign of commitment, but rather that it’s time to make changes in your organization. Second, make sure the way you’re allocating resources is realistic. Third, get better at cross-functional coordination. And finally, reward teams, not just individuals.

Sometimes the best way to tackle an ambitious project is to throw away the original blueprint, a CEO writes.

Creating value is about exceeding expectations. For any business decision, we must understand the expectations of the decision-maker, and provide a path to exceed those expectations. For leaders and managers seeking approval from their colleagues in the finance function for new projects and initiatives, this is an increasingly urgent priority, because organizations are looking ever more closely at the ‘business impact’ of their resourcing decisions. 

Bijan Moallemi is CEO of Mosaic, the first strategic finance platform that transforms the way business gets done.

As the business environment has changed, we have seen S&OP adapt to become a centralized business process that enables coordinating decision making. With this, a Product Review or Portfolio Review has become a critical step in mature or vanguard organizations to better understand and manage product offerings and inventory.

Research on firm search stresses the need for firms to adapt and align concurrently with their environment to optimize the ability to sense and seize opportunities for sustained performance. We postulate resource scarcity as an important contingency factor for the search-performance relationship, and assess its joint influence with high and low dynamism.

Complexity is the defining business and leadership challenge of our time. But it has never felt more urgent than this moment, with the coronavirus upending life and business as we know it. Since March, we’ve been talking to leaders about what it takes to lead through the most complex and confounding problems, including the pandemic. Today we continue our conversation with Margaret Heffernan (Read Part 1 here), author of Uncharted: How to Navigate the Future.

Complexity is the defining business and leadership challenge of our time. But it has never felt more urgent than this moment, with the coronavirus upending life and business as we know it. Since March, we’ve been talking to leaders about what it takes to lead through the most complex and confounding problems, including the pandemic. Today we speak with Margaret Heffernan, author of Uncharted: How to Navigate the Future.

Amid increasingly volatile business environments, companies must learn to harness technology to efficiently generate accurate forecasts.

What could your business achieve if your large capital projects were 30 to 50 percent faster and cheaper? The opportunity is more real than you think.

Freeing up cash on the balance sheet may be hard, but companies such as Johnson Controls are finding ways to establish a sustainable cash culture.

CFOs want FP&A to become stewards of value creation, not just keep score.

Product costing. A lost art?

A sprint-based transformation approach can help organizations achieve full potential.

Support and control functions like human resources and finance can empower Agile teams and benefit from becoming more Agile themselves.