Concept Management Quarter

Resource Planning Quarter (hereinafter, the Quarter) is the first of four lectures of Operations Quadrivium (hereinafter, the Quadrivium):

• The Quarter is designed to introduce its learners to enterprise discovery, or, in other words, to concepts related to obtaining data needed to administer the enterprise effort; and
• The Quadrivium examines concepts of administering various types of enterprises known as enterprise administration as a whole.

The Quadrivium is the first of seven modules of Septem Artes Administrativi, which is a course designed to introduce its learners to general concepts in business administration, management, and organizational behavior.

Outline

The predecessor lecture is Enterprise Architecture Quarter.

Recitals

Strategy implementation is the enterprise effort undertaken in order to implement the strategy designed during strategy design. The implementation can be divided in four batches:

1. To discover the new strategy designed during strategy design;
2. To analyze what new projects are needed to be launched and/or existing operations are needed to be maintained in order to implement the designed strategy;
3. To create the strategic plan that shall set up goals for every part of the enterprise and budgets available to support their endeavors;
4. To make sure that the created strategic plan is implemented to the best of its potential and results of that implementation serve as the input for strategy discovery of the new DADI cycle.

Concepts

1. Enterprise resource planning (ERP).
   • Enterprise effort. A determined attempt or a set of attempts undertaken in order to create outcomes of a task, activity, process, project or operations, and/or enterprise.
2. Enterprise goal. A desired outcome towards which the enterprise effort is directed.
   • Goal (objective). Desired outcome or target.
   • Real goal. A goal that an organization actually pursues, as defined by the actions of its members.
   • Stated goal. An official statement of what an organization says, and what it wants its various stakeholders to believe, its goals are.
   • Means-end chain. An integrated network of goals in which the accomplishment of goals at one level serves as the means for achieving the goals, or ends, at the next level.
3. Vision statement. A formal articulation of an organization's vision or mission.
   • Business goal. A state or condition the business must satisfy to reach its vision.
   • Business policy. A business policy is a non-actionable directive that supports a business goal.
   • Business rule(s). A business rule is a specific, actionable, testable directive that is under the control of the business and supports a business policy.
   • Business plan. A written document that interprets the strategic plan for enterprise stakeholders, for instance, financial or governmental institutions with regard to a business opportunity and articulation of how the identified opportunity is to be seized and exploited.
4. Enterprise performance. The accumulated results of all the enterprise's work activities.
   • Efficiency. The degree to which an enterprise gets the most outputs from the least amount of inputs.
   • Effectiveness. The degree to which an enterprise does those activities that result in achieving its goals. In other words, effectiveness is the measure of how an enterprise meets the needs of its clientele or customers.

     Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things. -- Peter Drucker, management consultant

   • Capability. An organization's skill and ability in doing the work activities needed in its business.
5. Enterprise administration. Practice and a set of concepts, based on that practice, that define culture of administering all enterprise efforts from identifying business opportunities and up to getting of all enterprise outcomes and/or achieving enterprise impacts.
   • Administration. The process or activity of running a business, organization, etc. or the officials who executive that process or activity.
   • Management. The process or activity of dealing with or controlling things or people.
6. Strategic management. What managers do to develop the enterprise's strategies, policies, and operative rules.
   • Enterprise objective. A measureable step taken in order to achieve the enterprise goal.
   • Objective. A target or metric that an individual, group, and/or enterprise seeks to meet in order to progress towards a goal.
   • Strategic management process. A six-step process that encompasses strategic planning, implementation, and evaluation.
7. Knowledge management.
   • Knowledge.
   • Idea management.
   • Strategic flexibility. The ability to recognize major external changes, to quickly commit resources, and to recognize when a strategic decision was a mistake.
8. Value chain management. The process of managing the sequence of activities and information along the entire value chain.
   • Business development.
   • Deployment. Introduction of a new activity, procedure, or program to an organization.
9. Performance management.
   • Performance. The end result of an activity.
   • Incremental budgeting. Process starting with the current budget from which managers decide whether they need additional resources and the justification for requesting it.
10. Compliance management.
    • Total quality management (TQM). A philosophy of management that is driven by continuous improvement and responsiveness to customer needs and expectations.
11. Cost of quality. The costs incurred to ensure quality. The cost of quality includes quality planning, quality control, quality assurance, and rework.
    • Rework. Action taken to bring a defective or nonconforming item into compliance with requirements or specifications.

Roles

1. Top manager. A manager at or near the upper levels of the organizational structure who are responsible for making organization-wide decisions and establishing the goals and plans that affect the entire organization.
2. Board of directors. A group of influential individuals, elected by stockholders, chosen to over see the affairs of a company. A board typically includes investors and mentors. Not all startups have a board, but investors typically require a board seat in exchange for an investment in a company.

Methods

1. DADI (or DADI pattern). The enterprise development pattern that divides enterprise administration in four batches: Discovery (D), Analysis (A), Design (D), and Implementation (I). Although the batches tend to be both consecutive and complete, this statement is rarely true. Most frequently, Discovery can occur at any time and the newly discovered data re-starts the process.

Instruments

1. ERP software.

Results

1. Strategic plan. A plan that applies to the entire enterprise, formalizes its enterprise portfolio, and establishes the enterprise's overall goals. This plan also defines its business models and may or may not include related competitive strategies.
   • Strategy. The plan for how the organization will do what it's in business to do, how it will compete successfully, and how it will attract and satisfy its customers in order to achieve its goals.
   • Commitment concept. Plans should extend for enough to meet those commitments made when the plans were developed.
   • Roadmap. A strategic plan to create a product or complete a project. A roadmap describes the individual steps required to meet a set of goals or objectives. (see Startup Land: A Roadmap for Entrepreneurs for more info)

Practices

• Some practitioners believe that business plans have no value for the business itself.

  No business plan survives first contact with customers -- Steve Blank, entrepreneur

  Indeed, it is impossible or almost impossible to predict revenues with no historical data. Furthermore, every bank asks about a business plan, but no real bank provides a business with external funding based on a business plan alone. Taking into consideration these observations, business plans may be considered as documents that banks need in order to report to the government and to use in their public relations that the banks support business.

The successor lecture is Validated Learning Quarter.