Let’s discuss the following scenario:

“I am a manager in a small tech company – bleeding edge type of company, with highly skilled people.  We have a good reputation, and, of course we like to maintain and retain it.”

“We have a mission and a vision, but our goals are somehow general, we are not sure how to quantify them.  We have a lot of knowledge in people’s minds and we rely on that.  We are continuously assessing more or less formally the business context, but we didn’t do a formal analysis of our Strengths, Opportunities, Weaknesses and Threats.

We  are successful and our services and products are well received by our customers.  We take pride in what we do and we are happy to see that the demand for what we do is increasing.  At the same time, we realize and we experience first hand the first bumps in the road of scaling up?”

FROM REACTING TO PROACTIVELY MANAGING RISKS
This is a typical scenario that describes the real challenge of small successful companies moving from startup stage to the next level. Ideally, this is the time to start the transformation of business operations from reactive to proactive operations; in other words, moving from reacting to risk to proactively managing risk.

Otherwise, if the company continues doing things the way are done in startup mode, it may run the risk of not being able to scale up and sustain growth.

A few questions may help starting the discussion of what it takes to adjust the way the company does business to gain increased agility.

1. How much do leaders, managers and everybody else agree and want to change the way some of things are being done, including change some behaviors, if that will be necessary?
2. How much leaders and managers are willing to actively participate and sustain the effort of the transformational change over a long period of time?  How much understanding is there of the journey of continuous improvement and not a limited, finite project?
3. Do we have a mission, vision and values for our organization?  Is there a process in place of reviewing them on regular bases?
4. Do we do regularly SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis?
5. Do we define and review the strategy that would support our Mission, Vision, Values?
6. Do we have a strategic planning process and define quantifiable strategic goals?
7. Did we ever took a step back and tried to articulate our end-to-end business processes?
8. Did we ever made a complete list of all suppliers and all customers?
9. Did we ever go through the exercise of putting down all the inputs we need to do our best possible job and define their quality requirements? Do we have an approach to communicate these with our suppliers to make sure they understand and are able to provide what we need at our expectations?
10. Did we ever go through the exercise of putting down all the outputs / products our organization is creating for our customers?  Do we understand and have measures for what means value for our customers?  Do we use these measures to manage what we do?
11. How much knowledge is in the people’s minds?  Do we have highly skilled people that are very good at what they do?  What will happen if they miss work or leave?
12. Do we have managers and leaders that were promoted or hired because their excellent technical skills?  How much management training do they have?  How much leadership training do they have?  How much performance excellence training do they have?
13. As the organization is growing, do we have approaches in place to understand and communicate well with all employees at all levels?  Do we have a way to assess their effectiveness?
14. Do we have a career path well defined for all employees?
15. How much leadership awareness is that a sustainable organization needs a culture of strong employee engagement and innovation?  How much effort the leaders and managers are ready to invest in creating and sustaining such a culture?

MANAGING RISKS
Many times, when organizations go through initial organizational stages, the focus stays on the products.  The organization structure and the processes (both operational processes and people processes) get patched to respond to the increased demand, without a systematic approach to articulate them in alignment.

Many times, no measures are in place and there is no understanding how to select the measures that would provide the needed information for running the business. Management by process is also not acknowledged or understood.

All these create an increased risk that could be avoided by acknowledging the challenges and the needs of the next organizational stage and start the transformational change required to put the organization on the path of success and continuous improvement.

Bio:

Adina Suciu CSSBB, CMQ/OE, is principal consultant at Adav, LLC a Seattle based company focused on helping people and organizations to attain and sustain agility. She is also a Baldrige examiner and assessor for the European Framework for Quality Management. She can be reached at adina@adavconsulting.com and at 206.234.8014.