New Year Resolutions… for your business

1.   Measure everything

If you aren’t measuring, you are running blind. And eventually, one way or another, that’s going to hurt.

Without measuring, you do not know where you stand or what good looks like or how hard you need to push to raise the bar because you won’t even know where the bar is.

The good news is anything can be measured. It is the key to solving many problems in business and life in general. In fact, the chances are good that some part of your life or your professional responsibilities is being negatively impacted by a lack of measurement.

ROI, speed to market, organizational flexibility, customer satisfaction, technology risk and much more. 

We need to know where we stand so that we can make a difference and crucially, know we’ve made that difference.

So resolution number one is to incorporate measurement tools, methodologies and analysis time into your workflows. If you already have these systems in place, that’s great – now look to improve on them.

2.     Manage Performance

Performance management is integral to all successful business outcomes. 

In situations where there is little or no insight into the performance of a business unit, product, person or company overall, the situation often becomes clear only when, unfortunately, it is too late to react.

All too often, Key Performance Indicators are exclusive to finance or business analysis. That’s a missed opportunity. Involvement in setting and understanding meaningful KPIs for a business should be part of your everyday processes and integrated across your entire business. 

Research shows time and time again that employee engagement increases as they become more aware of how their actions impact the overall performance of their team, business, or company.

Thankfully, setting goals and KPIs has become much easier in recent years thanks to new tools and technologies, so there’s really no excuse not to keep this resolution!

3.   Automate everything

People can feel their time being wasted when they’re required to repeat tasks that could be automated. 

From the admin clerk manually stamping documents to the salesperson writing out the same responses to customer questions to the developers manually deploying across multiple servers. 

The time spent on these repetitive tasks is not only wasteful. As time goes on, lapses in focus will eventually lead to errors.

I’ve often heard the mantra that anything you do more than twice should be automated. It’s a nice sentiment but the “should we automate?” question is actually a little more complex to weigh up.

On one side, we have the time spent writing and deploying the automation and on the other, we have the time saved, the knowledge gained during automation, the empowerment gained by creating useful tools and of course the mental drain saved by not carrying out repetitive tasks.

Resolve to take time to uncover the repetitive tasks in the business, assess whether it makes sense to automate, automate wherever it does and free your team to refocus on high-value creative tasks instead of mundane work. The returns on this making and keeping this resolution can be transformational.

4.   Have a plan to pay back your Technical Debt

It’s na?ve to say we should have zero technical debt. Just like when financing a business, accruing a little debt can be beneficial to growth - provided you understand, plan and manage it from the outset.

For example, quick win coding can help you get a piece of code to market sooner and help serve your customer’s need more quickly. Take the speed of innovation that many companies achieved during the pandemic – in many cases, technical debt was leveraged and for good reason.

So, you don’t always need to avoid technical debt. Instead, resolve to audit the technical debt you have accrued, be aware of its true costs and the time you’ll need to pay it back. Just like a loan, commit to when and how you will repay it. Denial isn’t a strategy!

5.   Make it resilient

Software today is greatly more complex than that of yesteryear, when all you needed was a web server and a database. Today’s systems are gnarly and distributed, with intricacies created by onprem, hybrid public and private clouds, virtualization, containers, clusters, microservices, security perimeters and controls - just to name a few.

Irrespective of whether they are old or new, systems can and will fail. Murphy’s law prevails. 

Once you’ve reconciled yourself to that universal rule, the question then is: how do you maintain continuity of service in spite of failing systems?

Just like an ecosystem of a forest can survive a wildfire, our systems need to be adequately resilient to service the customer without disruption. Zero downtime come what may should be the goal!

We can now all access the tools and strategies needed to build in resilience. Things like fortifying service resilience, enabling rolling deployments, retry functions, synthetic transaction testing and generally engineering for redundancy to name a few… 

With the availability of today’s technology - much of it in the Cloud - there’s so much more we can do. Not being complacent and resolving to make our businesses more resilient in 2021 is the first step. 

 6.   Inch towards the Cloud

Needless to say, the Cloud is where we all need to be heading. Therefore, in every technology decision we make, every design we architect, every new service we build – let’s ask ourselves “Why not Cloud?”

The journey towards Cloud is one I believe every organisation will need to make if it’s going to survive and thrive. So if you haven’t started out with Cloud yet, resolve to take it one step at a time starting today and by this time next year, you’ll be amazed at the progress you’ve enabled.

#Cloud #DigitalTransformation #2021