What The Hell Is a Business Strategy?
Soon I will have to write a paper analysis on how an organization, of my choosing, manages projects. One of the questions that I will need to answer is how they connect business strategies to IT projects. Being someone who writes code for a living and rarely deals with the more managerial aspects of a project I never really thought about what exactly a business strategy is. So I went on a hunt for answers. Instead of looking into the course material I went to investigate on the internet what it actually means. I found a video done by Jeroen De Flander, Professor at Tias Business School & Society where he clearly explains what a strategy is.
A strategy is a choice. As an individual or organization you make a choice in a certain industry you would like to operate in. You will make a choice by determining who your client is. Next, you have to ask yourself ‘how am I going to make the client happy?’. This is what a strategy is.
When you figured out those two points, you’ll roughly know what kind of plan of attack you’ll need to apply in making your client happy. But, for how long? Now comes the part where you determine how long you apply your strategy. A strategy is typically followed for 7 years. However, in the software industry, 1.5 to 2 years is long enough to base a strategy on.
The shorter amount of time is due to the fast-paced changes in this field.
You will want to check periodically whether your strategy is still effective.
Jeroen recommends checking right before the budget planning within your organization or right before the annual cycle.
Furthermore, you need what is called a finish line. This is the act of making your strategy tangible for everybody involved in the execution of the strategy. The formulation of a finish line should be short enough to be put in a weekly update e-mail but emotional and powerful enough to make people want to be involved. An example would be “We want to serve 10 000 customers by the end of the month!” and “We want to launch our biggest product in 6 months!”.
Lastly, next to your strategy, you should create a list with No’s. This is a list of things that you are not going to do. Examples include, clients you are not going to serve. Products or features you are not going to work on. They all need to be relevant to your strategy of course.
Again, like I said. A strategy is a choice, bound to a certain amount of time. It should be possible to summarize it into a weekly update e-mail and emotionally enough to make people want to participate in the strategy.
A strategy should also be accompanied by a list of things that specifically will not be worked on. Jeroen gave quite a concise explanation in my opinion and I hope it has become clear for you as well what a business strategy is!
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