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Contributed on December 7, 2018

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Unlocking The Secrets To Building and Sustaining Competitive Advantage

Blog: KWKeirstead's Blog

Competitive Advantage is the result of better use of available Resources.

The range of Resources for any corporation can include:

Capital, Access to Capital, Land, Equipment, Tools, Premises, Staff, Current Products/Services, Products / Services Under Development, Projects Awaiting Approval, Technology Trends, Changing Legislation, Competitors.

                                                                                                                                                             Benwhitephotography

We know from RBV (Resource Based View) that corporations that are able to “view” all of their Resources tend to make better decisions re building up a proper mix of initiatives that draw on these resources (i.e. avoid high risk / low return initiatives; avoid initiatives that tie up key resources for too along a timeline; terminate or cancel initiatives that are non-performing).

Clearly, Operations needs to ensure that their primary focus is on work that advances the state of initiatives with contemporaneous focus on work that is supportive of ongoing initiatives (i.e. maintaining compliance with external rules and regulations).

A problem arises when Operations puts too sharp a focus on, for example, processes.

There is no direct path between “continuous process improvement” and success from the implementation of corporate initiatives.  Whereas process improvement impacts efficiency, it only impact effectiveness marginally.

The direct path from work to competitive advantage is as detailed below:

Competitive Advantage ->

  <- Strategy Development ->

    <- Selection & Prioritization of Initiatives ->

      <- Work

It’s not that difficult for an organization to transition to this model.

1.

Actors who perform the work and oversee the progress of work need a workspace (commonly called “Case”).

2.

The workspace must have an undercurrent comprising

• orchestration from background BPM,
• governance at the CaseInitiative level,
• workload management i.e. RALB (Resource Allocation, Leveling, Balancing)
• non-subjective assessment of progress toward meeting goals/objectives i.e. FOMM (Figure of Merit Matrices).

See some 300+ articles on the importance of orchestration from workflows, governance, workload management and non-subjective approaches to decision – making for both strategy development, and for achievement of operational efficiency and effectiveness

https://kwkeirstead.wordpress.com/