Communication - Key to Business Strategy

Right around the planning cycle for next year, one question starts to bother me - how often do we discuss the strategic direction that we are setting for our business, once the planning cycle is over? Why is that?

1. Is senior management not crafting/revisiting the strategic road-map that is well understood? 
   
2. Is middle management not in-tune with the strategic impact their roles are making on the company’s bottom-line? 
   
3. Or, is it a matter of not communicating the vision, that can be permeated through the organization?

I believe there is an element of all of the above. Here, I want to call out a certain lack of communication that is rampant in most organizations. Let's look at the business reviews, for instance, that are conducted weekly, monthly, etc. Are these backward looking or forward looking? Is there enough element of the latter for all to see? The answer in most cases is "no" or "not enough." 

• There are goals and plans in place for the current and the upcoming year, but how often are they reinforced? 
• How frequently, do we meet to take a stock of business progress and how it aligns with the plan we had set for ourselves? 
• What are the new projects, competitive landscape, consumer needs, operational efficiency improvements, etc., that need more attention than was envisaged at the planning stages?

If these are not addressed and collectively communicated to the teams, there will always be a certain degree of dissatisfaction and lack of coherence  among the troops. What we do during the year ought to be calibrated against the plan we built, but more importantly, the plan we revise as we go. Management cadre should take note!

Succeeding with business analysts

Every organization employs business analysts through different titles, business units, reporting structure, etc. What I often found was a significant disconnect among the duties, organizational goals and qualifications of the employees involved. Here I am not referring to individual qualifications, instead how they fit in with the management’s vision of applied analytics to achieve organizational goals.

I have had financial analysts performing the tasks of a marketing analyst, a web analyst performing the task of a business analyst and so on.

I believe there are 3 key considerations in improving the effectiveness of a business analyst to an organization:

• Qualifications – a business analyst should be numbers savvy, have keen business acumen and be able to visualize and theorize (this is often the most ignored). However trivial this may sound, it is more common than one would imagine.
• Clear goal definition – business unit heads should clearly define the business analysts’ roles, More importantly, they should resist the temptation to “take on more” because the organization is budget constrained and analyst is the “closest fit” to the functional skills needed for say, a tech analyst, tagging/implementation/Q&A analysts, etc. This only helps to dilute the impact a pure thinker and data expert can provide to analyzing and improving the business operations.
• Direction from management – managers should provide continuous direction and help channelize the theories on business performance that analysts come up with based on their continuous interaction with data. The challenge is to stay focused on organization goals, identify high-impact analysis/recommendations and prioritize projects with clear ROI and benefits.

Being in a large organization, I have struggled with all of the above, which resulted in not being able to hire/retain good talent, and/or generate and apply good analytical insights to test our theories. 

The issues in achieving the maximum efficiencies are sometime genuine, but without a qualified analyst, clear goals and leadership, we are not giving ourselves a fair shot at tackling them. Have a story? Share your experiences of how these hurdles were overcome in your organizations.