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ISCOVER
The end of the financial year brings a chance to review what’s worked and what hasn’t. For many – once taxes are complete – it’s an opportunity to look at further ways to boost the business.
Diversification has been the catch-cry for the first half of 2014 and it looks set to continue, so for brokers this boost could involve extending the collateral range or introducing a new lender to the product offering. But how often do you consciously sit down to plan the business requirements for making strategic changes like these?
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Before rushing to implementation, spend time understanding the business purpose of the project, outlining the problem and the opportunity, as well as being very clear about your objectives. Setting SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, timely) goals will help to ensure the project can be evaluated properly.
The next step is identifying the project team to manage the change. Depending on the size of your business, this can include the business owner, project manager, project sponsor and IT owner. Inevitably any business change has an impact on IT systems, so make sure to keep your IT people – whether in-house or outsourced – in the loop.
Once all goals are set and your project team is in place, outline the project’s scope. This includes:
• Detailing the project requirements, eg. offer a new service in response to customer demands
• Outlining the assumptions that have been made in the planning process, eg. training provided by supplier
• Identifying the project dependencies, eg. aggregator approval
• Identifying key risks and issues, eg. new partner performance, and formulating mitigation strategies
• Describing how your business operates currently (the ‘as-is’ environment) and how you want the business to be (the ‘to-be’ environment). Draw flow charts using a program like Lucidchart to help produce step-by-step processes
• Identifying the stakeholders who will be affected by the change, eg. staff, customers, suppliers or partners. This will also help you determine the processes needing change, and the level of internal and external communication required, eg. customer service, staff and marketing.
Before launch, develop a test and implementation plan using a project management tool like Smartsheet. The test plan is your opportunity to check all systems work, involving the end user if you can, and make any necessary changes before rolling out the new product and/or lender. The implementation plan details the exact actions required to make the project a success, such as training and communications, and deadlines. Once the changes are in place, make sure to document these in an operations manual for new and existing staff.
When the day comes to roll out the new project, bear in mind that something could go wrong, so monitor it closely and make sure the project team is on standby to act quickly. After roll-out, always do a follow-up to check the project is running successfully and whether any further enhancements can be made.
It’s easy to simply want to get on with the work but, as the saying goes, time spent planning is never wasted as planning is the key to a successful project.
