How do you balance innovation and risk in your strategic planning?

??In my experience, the SWOT analysis is a crucial first step in strategic planning. It provides a comprehensive overview of your organizational status. ??Strengths Identify core competencies, resources, and positive attributes that give your organization a competitive edge. ??Weaknesses Recognize internal areas needing improvement or factors hindering performance and efficiency. ??Opportunities Explore external conditions or trends that the organization can capitalize on to achieve its objectives. ??Threats Acknowledge potential external challenges or risks that could negatively impact the organization. ??Conclusively, SWOT analysis is instrumental in aligning your strategies with your organization’s capabilities and market realities.

Balancing innovation and risk in strategic planning requires clear objectives and a keen understanding of the organization's risk tolerance. Encourage diverse ideas and prioritize testing before full-scale implementation. Conduct scenario analyses, develop risk mitigation strategies, and use data for informed decisions. Foster cross-functional collaboration and embrace failures as learning opportunities. Ensure compliance and maintain a long-term perspective. Recognize that some risk is essential for sustained growth. Finally, secure leadership buy-in to align with the innovation strategy and comprehend associated risks and rewards.

I am an experienced technology leader who can easily understand and prioritize business requirements and can propose multiple solutions with pros and cons. At Allied Universal, I am leading Workforce Automation that needs innovation and problem-solving every day. I helped our organization to move from legacy, on-premises, hard-to-scale, and hard-to-maintain applications to a state-of-the-art contact center using AWS Connect, AWS Lex, and serverless metered service AWS Lambda. When our HR team needed a solution to contact candidates for new positions, I proposed using AWS Pinpoint to identify the right candidates with inclusion and exclusion criteria like skills, location, and requirements creating outbound campaigns with 90% accuracy.

My objective is always to grow my organization with the people and productivity associated with it. At Allied Universal, the WFM solution helped us to 1. Resolve staff requests with 30% less time with immediate response and 90% accuracy in resolution. 2. Saved more than 30% in operating cost compared to legacy systems 3. Added more than 30 new engineering staff, onboarding more than 30K security guards. Improving staff, and client satisfaction with changes in assignments, payment resolution, and documentation.

I advocate for an iterative approach in exploring strategic options. Utilize AI-driven simulations to model various scenarios. At Allied Universal, we leveraged our WFM AI to project staffing outcomes, leading to optimal resource allocation and risk mitigation. Always test small before scaling. This empowers data-informed decisions, propelling innovation while safeguarding against volatility.

As innovation facilitator of 100+ projects I like to share how you can MITIGATE PROJECT RISKS in 10 WAYS 1. Market Research: Understand your target audience and their needs. 2. Prototyping: Build and test prototypes to identify flaws. 3. Cross-functional Teams: Bring together experts from various disciplines. 4. Iterative Development: Break the process into phases. 5. User Feedback: Involve users to gather insights and validate. 6. Risk Analysis: Identify potential risks and their impact. 7. Minimum Viable Product (MVP): Launch an MVP. 8. Agile Method: Embrace agile practices to adapt. 9. Quality Assurance: Implement robust testing procedures to catch bugs. 10. Communication: Maintain clear communication within your team.

Entrepreneurial simulation games, like InnoBall (Innovation Brainball), are a great way to exlore scenarios and options. Simulation games help aspiring innovators strengthen their business models and reduce risks. InnoBall helps also strengen and assess capabilities of the innovation team which is highly important for those who make an investment decision.

At Allied Universal, we have almost reached all our functional requirements for WFM that are currently needed for our day-to-day operations and replace most of our legacy systems cost-effectively. I proposed to our executive leadership that we can make our solution a configurable multitenant solution that we can share with other Professional Services companies providing security. This can repurpose our investment, generate revenue, and can fund a few more features that are more complex like integrating all monitoring tools - IoT, cameras in the stream, and big data analytics. We are planning to achieve this by adding a newly acquired business as a tenant in our solution.

We are working on achieving this by adding a newly acquired business as a tenant in our solution. Our goal is to migrate all acquired businesses to our primary WFM solution.

Balancing innovation and risk is akin to walking a tightrope. A few years ago, our team was excited about a novel project. As we delved into scenario planning, we created a parallel risk map, capturing potential pitfalls each scenario could bring. One innovative scenario, while promising high returns, had significant unmitigated risks. We identified potential operational challenges that weren’t immediately apparent. This made us reconsider, and instead, we adopted a safer approach resulting in steady growth without encountering the disruptions our risk map predicted. Lesson: effective risk assessment makes strategy both innovative and grounded. Embracing innovation is vital, but understanding its associated risks ensures sustainability.

We have already added one of our features Electronic Time Keeping in a multi-tenant model that our newly acquired company has started using. It took only less than a month to create a pilot program for them. This pilot program has given us a good idea what are the efforts and risks associated with converting our solution as multi-tenant software as a service with estimates for operational costs and success factors.