Dealing with Evolving Business and Strategic Needs
If you run a business, or are a smaller part of the whole, your job is to fulfill needs. These needs take on many broad shapes, though I’m sure it’s easy to identify the ones that haunt impact you every day. In order to fulfill these needs, we create processes or products, or products with processes; in all cases, these are the solutions we provide.
Where the wrench comes in is when the needs of the business change. While this happens often, what doesn’t happen a lot is rethinking our solutions because of these changes. It’s no wonder why though. Only in the last few years has technology and the web as a platform made it easier than ever to architect a solution in a way that it doesn’t break the bank to re-tool your business solutions quickly and inexpensively. But even if you don’t think you can afford to change, having the self-awareness that you need to is a good first step.
Starting to uncover whether your solutions are in need of change is easy, just ask yourself, or your team, these questions, “What are our business needs and how have they changed?” and, “Do our solutions still meet these needs in the best way possible?”
But answering those is just the first step in enacting change. To do something about it you need to figure out what action to take. This can be hard without some form of guidance; taking action is almost always the hardest part. So here are some pre-canned actions that you can start with to guide you towards the best way to change your solutions:
Persevere
This is the easiest action to take because it’s really just acknowledging that your solutions do in-fact still line up with your business and strategic needs. Keep on going, you’re either doing something right or completely deluded.
Pivot
This is one of the hardest actions to take, but usually pretty easy to see. If your entire business model has changed, then most definitely your needs have changed in a big way too, and thus, you may need to take your solutions and point them in an entirely new direction.
Sidestep
This might be the most common action you need to take. Your solution still meets your needs, but how that solution is built, or presented, or architected has become out-dated, or there is new technology that can make this thing a whole lot better. Sidestepping is how you evolve with your business, and if you’re able to do this more frequently than not, you’ll be setting yourself up to avoid the harder actions in this list.
Realign
This is when your solution started out with the right intentions, but at some point it got lost along the way and now is filled with features or processes that really don’t get you towards meeting those needs. This is a really common thing to happen, but if you can continue to put your core needs at the center of the discussion you can quickly weed out the things that are taking you off track.
Restart
This can be a very bittersweet decision, and most-definitely the hardest psychologically. But the fact of the matter is, sometimes solutions reach their end of life. By restarting you might be throwing a lot away, but at the same time you now open yourself to a large variety of new solutions that could be disruptively innovative towards your company.
Focus
Lastly, one of my favorite actions. Focus means evaluating your solution and finding the 20% of it that meets 80% of your needs. Very much like the Lean Startup’s MVP (Minimum Viable Product), you can work backwards into an efficient, low-overhead solution that still meets a huge portion of your needs.
Finally, for those more graphically entertained, here is a quick infographic of the whole process:
