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.
3. Agile team. A work team that is responsible for committing to work, delivering and driving the product forward from a tactical perspective in terms of Agile methodology. Usually, an Agile team is a small, high-functioning group of five to nine people who collaboratively work together to complete an iteration or project. The team has the necessary skills and competencies to work on the project. Scrum teams are cross-functional; Kanban teams can either be cross-functional or specialists. Scrum teams lack any roles. Kanban teams usually have team leads.
   • Agile team member. A member of an Agile team. Often, Agile team include engineers, architects, developers, analysts, QA experts, testers, UX designers, etc.
   • Team lead.
4. Scrum role. One of the following: product owner, Scrum master, Agile team member.
   • Scrum master. A facilitator for the team and product owner. Rather than manage the team, the Scrum master works to assist both the team and product owner in the following ways: (1) Remove the barriers between the development and the product owner so that the product owner directly drives development. (2) Teach the product owner how to maximize return on investment (ROI), and meet his/her objectives through Scrum. (3) Improve the lives of the development team by facilitating creativity and empowerment. (4) Improve the productivity of the development team in any way possible. (5) Improve the engineering practices and tools so that each increment of functionality is potentially shippable. (6) Keep information about the team's progress up to date and visible to all parties. Scrum master is often viewed as the coach for the team.
   • Product owner. A person who holds the vision for the product and is responsible for maintaining, prioritizing and updating the product backlog. In Agile methodology, the product owner has final authority representing the customer's interest in backlog prioritization and requirements questions. This person must be available to the team at any time, but especially during the Sprint planning meeting and the Sprint review meeting. Challenges of being a product owner: (1) Resisting the temptation to "manage" the team. The team may not self-organize in the way you would expect it to. This is especially challenging if some team members request your intervention with issues the team should sort out for itself. (2) Resisting the temptation to add more important work after a Sprint is already in progress. (3) Being willing to make hard choices during the sprint planning meeting. (4) Balancing the interests of competing stakeholders.

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.
2. Development methodology.
   • Methodology. A set of processes, rules, templates, and working methods that prescribe how business analysis, solution development and implementation is performed in a particular context.
   • Plan-driven methodology. Any methodology that emphasizes planning and formal documentation of the processes used to accomplish a project and of the results of the project. Plan-driven methodologies emphasize the reduction of risk and control over outcomes over the rapid delivery of a solution.
   • Change-driven methodology. A methodology that focuses on rapid delivery of solution capabilities in an incremental fashion and direct involvement of stakeholders to gather feedback on the solution's performance.
3. Agile methodology (or Agile development methodology). The project management approach of developing increments of prototypes and, eventually, the deliverable in frequent iterations based on evolving requirements. In other words, the Agile methodology is characterized by the division of tasks into short phases of work and frequent reassessment and adaptation of initial objectives. Instead of well-defined projects in the Waterfall model, the Agile one suggests a series of development sprints. This methodology emphasizes clearly-defined development rules with regard to both development and continuous feedback to refine the product scope rather than a predefined development process. This feature makes the methodology instrumental in those development that are inherently unpredictable. The Agile Manifesto was the initial public declaration for Agile methodology related to software. Its authors believed that they found "better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it."
   • Agile. (1) Able to move quickly and easily and/or (2) Agile methodology.
   • Scrum. The Agile methodology that features (a) a self-directed team with no specified project manager and no managers at all, (b) a high level of communication between team members especially through daily meetings called standups, and (c) a product owner who is responsible for continuous feeding tasks to the team. In Scrum, iterations are called sprints and are assigned a fixed length—sprints typically last one to two weeks, but can last as long a month.
   • Lean Agile methodology. An example of lightweight Agile methodology applied to project development. Lean Software Development combines the Lean manufacturing approach pioneered by Toyota in the 1950s (also known as just-in-time production) and Lean IT principles, and applies them to software. LSD places a strong emphasis on people and effective communication. LSD is defined by seven principles: (1) Eliminate waste, (2) Create knowledge, (3) Build quality in, (4) Defer commitment, (5) Optimize the whole, (6) Deliver fast, (7) Respect people
   • Lean UX. Inspired by Lean and Agile methodologies, Lean UX speeds up the UX process by putting less emphasis on deliverables and greater focus on the actual experience being designed.
   • Test-driven development (TDD). The practice of designing and building tests for functional, working code, and then building code that will pass those tests.
4. Kanban. A highly visual framework that falls under the Agile umbrella. The Kanban process uses continuous work flow rather than fixed iterations to produce shippable deliverables. When applied over an existing process, Kanban encourages small, incremental changes to the current process and does not require a specific set up or procedure. Kanban focuses on completing entire projects rather than sprints.

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.