Part 3 in a 3 part series on tools for the technology social enterprise artist/strategist/entrepreneur.
Some social entrepreneurs are able to identify a technology market opportunity. And, they may be able to identify an organizational strategy, but fail to implement effectively or adapt the plan in a systematic way. Strategy development is a creative and interesting activity. But, it is far more difficult to implement strategy – to ensure that the strategic purpose is optimized yet provides sufficient agility to adjust to real world opportunities. There is a school of thought that suggests that strategy ought to be avoided because it hamstrings management to a narrow set of options. And, these options were developed in the vacuum of business planning with spreadsheets. This can be true when organizations implement strategy wrong by building granularity explicit actions. Organizations need to implement based on the intent of the strategy rather than compliance with a set of pre-determined actions. This means that managers need tools that enable agility with strategic intent.
Pragmatic Marketing framework
- Link: http://www.pragmaticmarketing.com/about-us/framework
- Used to: identify the functions of strategy development and execution
- Focus period: on-going
- Useful for: the entire strategy lifecycle, critically provides a way to identify what functions need to be performed that can be mapped to organizational roles
Value Proposition Architecture
- Link: http://torgronsund.com/2011/11/29/7-proven-templates-for-creating-value-propositions-that-work/ [7 templates]
- Used to: solidify and then simplify the value proposition of any product or service
- Focus period: at launch of any product or service
- Useful for: determining the key points and elevator statement, enables maintaining consistency across multiple products and services
Robert S. Kaplan and David P. NORTON Balanced Scorecard
- Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balanced_scorecard
- Used to: manage organizational performance
- Focus period: yearly adjustments based on results, but should be a daily tool
- Useful for: identified the measures that are important and ought to dominate management information. Unlike generic scorecards, the balanced scorecard balances measures and shows dependencies among customer, financial, process and staff elements.
Geoffrey Moore’s Projects to PLaybooks to Products
- Link: http://www.amazon.com/Escape-Velocity-Free-Companys-Future/dp/0062040898
- Used to: adapt processes and plans depending on product maturity
- Focus period: during growth periods
- Useful for: identifying when to shift focus from project work to reusable work through playbooks to mature product
Lean/Agile Techniques
- Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agile_software_development and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lean_Startup
- Used to: processes that enable change, particularly in social enterprises developing technology
- Focus period: continuous
- Useful for: testing innovative products and ideas, iterating rapidly, getting customer/user feedback enabling change before it’s too late
Business Component Mapping
- Link: https://www.research.ibm.com/haifa/projects/software/cbm/index.html
- Used to: identify priority processes through a heat map that need to be automated & can be used when developing a product strategy for a technology social enterprise
- Focus period: at key evolutionary points in organizational growth and for product design for technology companies with updates as needed
- Useful for: prioritizing internal information systems, for designing coherent and extensible technology products
Matt Andrews, Lant Pritchett, and Michael Woolcock: Problem-Driven Iterative Adaptation
- Link: http://www.cgdev.org/publication/escaping-capability-traps-through-problem-driven-iterative-adaptation-pdia-working-paper
- Used to: managing complex implementation
- Focus period: continuous
- Useful for: change management, root cause analysis, understanding context