Problem Statement:

Many factors affect the success of your business. Of those, some are external and are outside your span of control. We focus on the elements that can, and should be managed by any organization.

As a rule, a business is an organized team of people using specific resources to create tangible outcomes. For example, a government department is an organization that uses specific budget and existing infrastructure (building, furniture, computers, software, etc.) to provide services and products to customers; a small startup, which conceivably could consist of only one employee, can launch a world-class software product out of a home office.

Success capability can be measured by the business' organizational effectiveness. We characterize this effectiveness by comparing quality and quantity of outcomes with the cost and time required to produce them. The challenge is that most of the businesses have a very limited ability to measure their effectiveness.

Building on solid business practices as a key success enabler

It all seems so simple. You know how much money you spent, you know how long it took, and you know what you produced. So, you have what we need to calculate business effectiveness, right? In fact, although retrospective examination is valuable, this only provides a partial picture. To be truly successful, a business requires detailed effectiveness metrics and targets, with a vehicle to predict business decisions' impact on measures.

Any business or organization must continuously improve its business practices to be successful. Change management drives effectiveness measurement. And it also supports the continuous improvement process.

Let us imagine a computer producing company XYZ is considering a motherboard vendor as a new supplier. As with any number of companies facing similar decisions every day, XYZ will base its decision on the cost and the feature content description. Alternately, an imagined competing company called ABC has an effective change management practice. ABC collects and examines more significant metrics to make the same decision. For example, the rate of motherboard failures, the type, time, and cost of support service may have critical impact on ABC's business success.

The company's business model determinates metrics' selection and weighting. As an example, supplying computers to a large military organization could be very different from the service provided for the gamers market. With a superior decision-making capability based on solid business practices, ABC is simply more equipped for success than XYZ.

Effectiveness metrics' management must be based on consistent and high quality data collection. To be successful, a business must have organized business operations records, specific process adherence discipline, and a defined business model. These are attributes of a business implementing solid business practices.

Solid Business Practices (SBP) facilitates disciplined business data management. We provide a coherent environment for data aggregation. SBP enables your capability to implement the right metrics to support your business decision-making process.

Mission:

We help your business become successful by assisting you in building solid business practices. We provide the information management infrastructure you need to facilitate these practices. We help you learn from the experience of similar businesses.

How we will help you

• We will review your current processes and help you document and clarify them. We will compare your processes with industry standards and best practices. For example, if you produce software, we will compare your practices with the SEI's CMMI model.
• We will review the types of data you currently collect, and analyze your usage of tools that facilitate these processes.
• We will document the workflows you need to build your solid practice.
• We will develop and deploy the databases and tools you need to facilitate these workflows and integrate your existing data.
• We will help you in define your business model. We will help you establish your continuous improvement process such that workflows and tools automatically align with each enhancement.
• We will give you a dashboard for your aggregated business data and effectiveness metrics to support your decision-making process.
• We will host your applications if you decide to reduce your operational costs this way.
• We will facilitate your best practices sharing. If you wish, (and only if you wish) we will make your best practices available to other businesses for benchmarking. We will help you learn about world class practices and industry experience.