As a child growing up in the UAE, I remember a distant relative visiting us and educating my dad about sending money home to his parents in India through him and his “contacts” and that dad would get a better exchange rate. Obviously ignorant to the concepts of Informal Value Transfer or more popularly known as Hawala, my…
Simple processes, blocking, and tackling is the smartest way to market your firm.
(and…when I die, my headstone will have a giant check mark on it.)
I’m always amazed at the bureaucracy of some organizations, large or small. Some call it “analysis paralysis” but it’s really just people being afraid to make a decision, pull a trigger on a project, or just not wanting to get something done for some reason.
I hit a big goal of mine – finally – just before 2011 ended. I finished writing the novel I began five or so years ago. When I say finished, however, what I mean is that the very first, very rough draft is complete, ringing in at just under 80,000 words.
Know how that novel got written? One single, small word at a time, with lots of mistakes along the way. I learned what not to do, and through that, I learned what works.
People who perform the financial planning and analysis (FP&A) function in the finance organization put together and update the budgets and forecasts. In many companies, the “A” portion of this activity gets short shrift. That’s because the mechanical process of pulling together and collating the data takes up so much time that very little remains for analysis. The result is that planning and budgeting is a less useful business tool than it could be. Improving FP&A can give executives and managers more insightful analytics and easier access to analytical tools that support more accurate and timely planning and budgeting.
ERP systems not only collect information about transactions, they also automate processes. The latter includes managing the handoffs between roles and enabling electronic document creation and management associated with that. Indeed, it was the promise of improving process management and process execution that spurred companies to adopt ERP in the 1990s.
Why is it that so many people can’t get things done? (The key is…the same old organization and prioritization)
Across the board, we’re inundated with information – emails, vmails, RSS feeds we have to get to, Facebook posts we have to “like,” LinkedIn requests we have to respond to.
Not to mention meetings, voice conferences and everything else. So, who has the time to just plain work?
When practitioners, consultants and academics discuss leading organizational risk management practices, they hone in on people, processes and supporting technology. As major risk management failures in recent years have illustrated, mastering these three dimensions is necessary but not sufficient.
Effective enterprise risk management (ERM) — or any discreet risk management process — hinges on other dimensions as well, including organizational culture, behavior, ethics and change management … all the squishy, human stuff that defies convenient categorization in COSO cubes and other traditional risk management frameworks.
Risk management is associated with assessing and quantifying business risks, then taking measures to control or reduce them. As software technologies continue to grow in terms of power and complexity we are witnessing the rapid expansion of software into virtually every walk of our business and personal life. Poor software project management can lead to missing deadline, overrun of cost and can also be major cause of ultimate cause of customer dissatisfaction. The following techniques may be considered to assess and address the complete risk management process at your company.
At a recent conference of the Association for Operations Management (APICS), where I was a presenter, I attended a provocative talk by Alan G. Dunn, president and founder of GDI Consulting and Training Company. He questioned if leaders are born or can be grown. It is the classic “nature versus nurture” debate. It got me to thinking about whether analysts can be more than a support to others. Can they be leaders? I share some of Alan’s thoughts.