Let us explain why ‘Root Cause Analysis Boot Camp for Business Leaders’ is needed. Business Leaders are hired to drive change, bring in transformation, incubate new ideas and grow the business and not merely to sustain current levels. So it is important for them to be good at problem solving. That’s given and most business leaders come in with very good troubleshooting skills. They can clear bottlenecks and get things going.
Here are two statements about the nature of the business problems. Let’s say these are my hypotheses:
- Most of the business problems that we encounter (but for centennial events like pandemics) are not new. Eg: Not able to meet growth targets, delay in deliveries, quality and customer satisfaction issues, employee engagement & attrition issues, service disruption & continuity, etc. So the real problem solving skills that business leaders bring in is eliminating recurrence of problems.
- Today’s business models are very different. We live in a transient world where nothing is permanent – technology, people, process, product and competition. So problems are unique and cannot be solved with the same past wisdom.
I’m going to allow you to decide which of these fits in your scheme of things.
Immaterial of that, problems once solved will not recur under 3 conditions:
- We solved the correct problem (we knew the ‘Whats’)
- We identified the root causes (we knew the ‘Whys’)
- We addressed root causes with sustainable actions (we executed the ‘Hows’)
Unfortunately, we falter at least in one of these steps and that’s not good for the business. Buy why?
Based on my experience in mentoring several business leaders in solving business problems, the most common causes I notice are :
- Giving more importance to the problem solving methodology than the problem. Whether you use PDCA, DMAIC, 8D, IDOV, EDIPT, QC story, many leaders get lost in the semantics, steps, templates, etc.,
- Problem solving is siloed and not cross functional. Most business level problems need strong cross-functional participation
- Midway, they lose interest and switch to troubleshooting mode
- They are afraid to rack up the system level root causes
- Solutions are over engineered. They rely too much on technology, idealism and good will to be sustained in the long run.
How can leaders hone their business problem solving or root cause analysis skills?
The answer simply lies in learning by doing. Creating multiple opportunities to get their hands dirty with run problems and in doing so, every time improve. This is easier said than done. The most practical way to do this is through RCA Boot Camps.
Root Cause Analysis Boot Camp for Business Leaders covers:
- Acquiring knowledge by reasoning
- Self-paced digital learning
- Access to case files
- Knowledge assessments
- Working with cross-functional teams
- Working on 2 or more live problems, each time with increasing difficulty level
- Guidance and mentoring of an expert
- Defend the solution to senior management in a review presentation
- Becoming an internal subject matter expert
Should you have any questions regarding the RCA Boot Camps, feel free to reach out to us.
If you are looking for Root Cause Analysis Boot Camps in Chennai, Bangalore, Mumbai, Delhi and across India, contact us
#nilakantasrinivasan-j #canopus-business-management-group #B2B-client-centric-growth #Root-cause-analaysis #RCA
Sales Analytics Framework
The Analytics Framework for Sales aims to support a long term strategy of applying analytics in sales and to integrate seamlessly with remaining part of the organization’s analytics strategy.
There are 3 important pillars for effective deployment of Sales Analytics Framework. A framework like this, when implemented consistently, will shift Sales Analytics from a tactical business enabler to strategic business enabler.
There are two important prerequisites that act as a foundation for the 3 pillars and at least one over-arching philosophy to derive best out of the Sales Analytics Framework. Let us look at what are they:
Business Benefit of deploying Sales Analytics Framework:
Business Growth
The ultimate business objective of using Sales Analytics to help meet organizational long term and short term goals such as Market Share, Revenue Growth, Profitability, Customer Retention, Cross-sell, Upsell, Referral business, etc
Overarching Philosophy:
Change Management & Data Based Culture
Ultimately leaders play a big role in deciding how the outcomes of analytics are put in practice during the decision making process. Businesses have their priorities that are time sensitive and hence sales directors play a big role in deciding how these would be actually applied. Driving a culture of data or fact based decision making within the organization should be one priority when it comes to sales analytics. The benefits of sales analytics grow multi-fold when cultural change occurs.
The Pillars:
Data Management
The first and foremost success factor in Sales Analytics is the ability to acquire, clean, organize, integrate, describe, share, govern and store data to be used for analytics. Data is usually acquired from various sources. Most organizations hit a road-block right at this stage of the journey. The next step is to clean and integrate data from various sources so as to enrich its value before performing required analytics.
Sales Analytic Processes
The core sales analytic processes include the ability to enrich the data through advanced analytics & data science and to provide, visualization, exploratory data analytics (EDA), business insights to drive sales, develop predictive models such as propensity, lead scoring, up-sell, cross-sell prediction, etc. The ongoing optimization and deployment of models in the production environment and their regular refinement are all integral to Sales Analytic Processes. The element of focus for us in Sales Analytics Processes is to answer some of the design questions keeping in mind the above end states, such as Measure of Success of Analytics Program, what analytics are we going to perform, what data and models are we going to use and how will we share the results. Learn more about How can Sales Managers leverage Analytics?
Decision Engines
How do analytics capabilities deliver business value. Traditional outcomes of analytics decision engines were linked to information delivery and visualization enabled through Online Analytical Processing (OLAP)and data mining. On the other spectrum, insight discovery and integration to decision making processes are capabilities that add business value.
The Prerequisites
Sales Analytics Infrastructure
To start with organizations can work with minimal infrastructure for analytics, but to scale analytics capability, definitely investment in infrastructure is a must. Analytics Infrastructure, not restricted to Sales Analytics, includes databases and data warehouses, statistical and data mining systems, scoring engines, grids and cloud storage ,etc., The question that new entrants frequently ask is, is it not possible to start Sales Analytics without these. The answer is that it is possible. With SaaS, it is possible to put together low cost infrastructure to get started with sales analytics. In addition to storage and handling, software tools required for sales analytics are also part of the assets. While there are standard and custom tools, the best to start would be Tableau, R, Python, SAS, RapidMiner, Orange, etc. Learn more about Guide to Selecting Sales Analytics Software Tools
Sales Analytics Talent & Capability
Quite often this is the most ignored area in analytics and is also a pitfall. Organizations get neck deep in creating analytics infrastructure, acquiring talent to manage these, and analytics talent with IT capability to deploy these tools, but they fail to understand that business users are really the ones who need upskilling. If they fail to recognize and resist the usage of analytics in their daily work management, Sales Analytics will only remain a pilot project to showcase. Lead More about What specific analytical skills are needed for Sales Managers in the era of Analytics?
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Improving Your Organization’s Sales Analytics Capability
With the advent of Big data and Analytics, every single discipline of business entities have seen tremendous benefits derive out of data based insights. While Analytics has penetrated Operations, Supply Chain, Marketing, HR, and IT, one of the biggest beneficiaries that directly contributes to the top line of the organization is Sales Analytics. Marketing Analytics & Marketing Automation has ensured high return on investment for the marketing costs, increasing reach and quality of marketing communication. The demand so generated through effective marketing has to be converted to business volumes. This is where Sales Analytics plays a big role. Sales processes are quite complex, involving various partner organizations, internal functions, several legal and regulatory requirements. Adding to this complexity are factors such as engagement of off-role employees, high staff attrition, competition activity and economic conditions.
Sales Analytics plays a significant role in this pursuit. The dynamics of sales data and the factors mentioned above, demand that Sales Analytics be approached a little differently from other analytics programs such as Supply Chain or Operations Analytics. Traditional focus has been on acquiring an efficient Sales Analytics Solution, Sales Process Automation and Sales Intelligence technology tool. There are a variety of products in the market with incredible capabilities such as SAP Business Objects, Oracle Business Intelligence, Salesforce Wave analytics, Alteryx, Tableau, Qlik Sense Enterprise, Sisense, Microstrategy, etc.,
However, now-a-days, the business benefits from Sales Analytics are not usually constrained by technology capabilities rather by other factors such as:(arranged in no specific order)
- Data Quality & Data Governance
- Conviction of Sales Leadership towards data based selling
- Sales Analytics Talent & Capabilities
- Cross-functional Alignment
Unfortunately, leaders spend too much energy in selecting the right technology tool only to realize their team members aren’t ready for a heavy dose of data driven insights or ecosystem isn’t ready.
Data Quality & Data Governance
It’s no secret that sales data quality is a challenge as it involves partners, customers and external factors. Though hand-held devices, cloud storage and real time analytics tools have made eased things, no one can disagree that getting data that is reliable isn’t easy in sales. Further, many times it is difficult to audit its authenticity. Read More about the Importance of Data Quality & Data Governance for Sales Analytics.
Conviction of Sales Leadership towards data based selling
Sales is considered an art and building relationships with customers is considered as an enabler. Many Sales leaders don’t believe in looking beyond sales numbers. Metrics and data that provide insights and help us identify drivers aren’t given too much importance. Without this conviction, it is very difficult to see any real ROI for Sales Analytics investments. In fact, this is a show stopper. Read More about the Tips to build Sales leadership buy-in for data based selling through Sales Analytics
Sales Analytics Talent & Capabilities
In order to fully leverage Analytics and Big Data, Sales leaders need to build skills & capabilities among sales teams that include Quantitative Skills, Data or Fact based Decision Making & technical skills, Data based Problem Solving which will help them to decide what data is needed in any given scenario, framing hypotheses and validating the hypothesis through data. Read More about What specific analytical skills are needed for Sales Managers in the era of Analytics?.
Cross-functional Alignment
Prima facie, Sales Analytics seems to be an internal matter of the Sales function.However, true and meaningful Sales Analytics will require strong alignment of various functions such as Marketing, Supply Chain, Manufacturing, Quality, Product Development, Service, Business Planning, HR, etc. Studying the association of cross functional factors on Sales or Business Outcomes such as Market Share, Revenue, Profitability is very important. This means cross functional data sources will need to be analyzed in Sales Analytics. Read More about Non-Sales Data & its value in Sales Analytics.
Thus Building Organization’s Sales Analytics Capability needs a thoughtful & comprehensive approach.
#nilakantasrinivasan-j #canopus-business-management-group #B2B-client-centric-growth #sales-analytics #salesforce
Interview: Organizational Strategy Challenges & Solutions
Extract of an interview of Neil published in Consultants Review Magazine about Organizational Strategy Challenges and Solutions
The economy stands at a crucial juncture now and constant endeavour for excellence and accuracy has come to be more pivotal than ever before.
The goal now is to focus on industry needs with a futuristic perspective, in order to foresee the norms of tomorrow. Canopus Business Management Group (CBMG) is a business services firm that focuses on strategy implementation & business transformation to make them future fit, and it is this approach that has brought them a fair amount of success already. Incepted in 2009, by the MIT educated Nilakantasrinivasan Janakiraman(Neil), CBMG started operations in Chennai, with the vision of bringing something fresh to the consulting space. Read More
We are delighted and honored to share that Consultants Review Magazine has selected Canopus Business Management Group among 25 Most Promising Management & Strategy Consultants in India.
An extract from May 2015 Issue:
“Over the past decade the corporate world has witnessed dramatic shifts in its form, fi nance, marketing,HR,and outsourcing have all faced the change that is slowly gripping the entire sector. Devising business strategies, global marketing,and innovating new products now form the core of developing a business. In this changing arena, defi ning management & strategy consultants only in the role of advisors would be an understatement. Read More.
Most Promising Management & Strategy Consultant
As an entrepreneur or subject matter expert, building an product or service isn’t really difficult because you have all the ideas are packed in your head. In fact that is true for any one skilled professional. Unfortunately that doesn’t guarantee success when it comes launching a successful product or service.
Customers will choose or recommend products that best address their needs. Here’s an interesting real life story of a Jewish immigrant couple trying to meet their ends. In this process they end up building a business empire. I read this story in the book ‘Outliers: The Story of Success’ by Malcolm Gladwell.
Louis and Regina Borgenicht landed in America in the year 1889 as immigrants. Louis was struggling to feed his family of four. He tried various odd jobs with little or no success. He was desperate and was about to quit.
Here’s an extract from the book:
“The answer came to him after five long days of walking up and down the streets of the Lower East Side, just as he was about to give up hope. He was sitting on an overturned box, eating a late lunch of the sandwiches Regina had made for him. It was clothes. Everywhere around him stores were opening—suits, dresses, overalls, shirts, skirts, blouses, trousers, all made and ready to be worn.
Borgenicht took out a small notebook. Everywhere he went, he wrote down what people were wearing and what was for sale—mens wear, women’s wear, children’s wear. He wanted to find a “novel” item, something that people would wear that was not being sold in the stores. For four more days he walked the streets. On the evening of the final day as he walked toward home, he saw a half dozen girls playing hopscotch. One of the girls was wearing a tiny embroidered apron over her dress, cut low in the front with a tie in the back, and it struck him, suddenly, that in his previous days of relentlessly inventorying the clothing shops of the Lower East Side, he had never seen one of those aprons for sale.”
Rest of it is rags-to-riches story. The couple built a thriving business and a niche for women and kids apparels.
This lesson of success hasn’t changed with time. If you want to be the Borgenicht of your business line, then let the designing your new product start with what we define as ‘Gemba’. It is a Japanese word implying ‘the real place’. Borgenicht painstakingly yet meticulously gathered insights from Gemba. For your products or service, ‘the real place’ is where it is been used by your consumers. Hence ‘Gemba’ is the fountainhead of your new product ideas and implementation roadmap. Market Research is supposed to do that, but in today’s world, it is outsourced to an agency. Market research reports contain only tangible factors but Gemba insights are missed or misunderstood.
If you have a new product or service development lined up, it would be in your own interest that you visit ‘Gemba’ and gather insights that will feed to the success of your product rather than review the new product development plan in the board room sipping green tea and munching cookies.
Consider a Gemba visit for the following:
- Deciding your target segment
- Who will buy our products and who will not?
- Understanding common needs of different customer groups
- Understanding articulated and unarticulated customer needs
- Understanding customer journeys
- Understanding substitutes and alternates for your product
You will never notice problems in your business processes, if your measurement system isn’t accurate & precise.
Business Processes are packed with wastes(Muda). Open your 3rd eye to spot them.
Clarity on process ownership solves many problems at one go.
Surprises are part of every business. But you can build processes that don’t land you in such unpleasant surprises.
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