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Business Process Transformation – Engineering Quick Change
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As part of a high-level
business transformation initiative aimed at securing strategic jumps
in business performance and results I focused on the sales bid cycle
for a sizeable technology company.
Analysis indicated that
bid costs spent on unsuccessful bids, in the tens of millions of
dollars, were too high in comparison with revenues from business
won. The nature of the business necessitated high bid costs, so
the issue was how to improve qualification into the bidding process,
and to improve bid quality so as to increase the win ratio.
Best practice materials
were leveraged from other countries, adapted and extended for local
use and a new top-level business process was defined - it was one
of only a dozen processes defining the entire activities of the
company, such was its importance.
The process was documented
in flow charts, responsibility matrices, meeting pro forma agendas
and generic attendee lists, forms and simple definitions. Some of
the most interesting and useful work was in defining who was responsible
for what, preventing duplication and turf fighting and greatly increasing
the collaboration of stakeholders in the bid cycle.
The development process
was consultative but highly driven because of a sense of urgency.
Stakeholders who had an involvement in the process or an interest
in the outcome were presented with suggestions at every step, reactions
were noted and discussed and ideas gathered and fed back into the
next step. My team listened carefully, but we made the decisions,
we did not wait for, or seek, consensus, but argued our decisions
by demonstrating with outputs. This enabled very fast project completion
as consensus seeking takes a lot of time, advocacy works faster.
Once the outline of the
process was clear a process administrator (a senior line manager)
was appointed. The success of his role depended on this process
working well, so he was the logical owner. Once he knew that he
was going to have to manage the process his attention ensured that
what was finalized was practical.
Top management sponsorship
and involvement in the new process ensured that the process was
implemented and followed. It worked well, everyone bought in, we
refined details over the first couple of cycles, and then passed
the process to the process administrator to run and maintain.
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