Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

Developing a strategic operation plan is essential to ensure a valued delivery of any product or service.  If you believe that valued quality can occur without purposeful intent, then you may also believe that a dictionary can be created by randomly generating characters.  

An organization must develop a broad set of policies and procedures firm to produce the maximum value from all resources of a firm.  The policies and procedures must also align with the business’ long-term mission.  

Policies extend corporate decisions to staff members that do not possess the authority to make corporate decisions.  With policies integrated in its operations, a company can speed and improve responses for internal and external customers by preemptively extending decisions to lower-level employees.  With a parallel purpose, Procedures document optimal methods that produce a specific result.  While Policies and Procedures differ slightly, both predetermine effective actions to produce the greatest amount of value.

The challenge, especially for young, rapidly-evolving start-ups, is the constant change of internal and environmental factors.  However, change does not excuse the need for structure.  Change actually supports the need for structure.  While policies and procedures are documented, both should continuously adapt to organizational change, customer demands, and learned knowledge.  I refer to this concept as “Agile-Structure”.  Another common term is “Best Practices”.

Regardless of the term, operations must not allow their policies and procedures to become unyielding routines, dictated by inaccessible executives.  Instead this structure should become a technique to produce value more effectively than simply performing in an ad-hoc manner.  Organizations must be adaptive, listening actively to their employees, investors, clients, vendors, and the community.  With well tuned and applied policies and procedures, a company can increase the value and quality of its products and services.

Gordon Blackwell

Technology & Entrepreneurial Evangelist

Raleigh, NC

"Some see things and ask Why...  

I dream and ask Why Not..."

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