CORRECT VALUE SYSTEM, PREREQUISITE TO ORGANIZATIONAL EFFECTIVENESS

Is Incorrect Value System Affecting Your Business Performance?

Many a times the problems and difficulties faced by an organization are on account of not living its correct values. This anomaly could emanate from any of these causes

• ·           There are no clearly spelt-out organizational values.· 
•          The values are clearly written down but the behavior of your organization is not consistent with these values.·         
•      Value statement is flawed as it doesn’t reflect the correct values of the organization, thereby rendering all further implementation or evaluation efforts, an exercise in futility

All  Successful Businesses Live Their Correct Values 

Let’s look at the proactive solution to facilitate accomplishment of optimum organizational effectiveness, through identification, crystallization and implementation of the correct values by your organization. Being aware of the correct values of your organization is a very critical component and a key driver of the strategic, tactical or operational decisions made in your organization. Which means every worker on the shop floor, every field sales officer, every manager, every board member is aware of the organizational priorities. This facilitates uniformity in organization wide responses across different geographies, departments, hierarchies, business conditions, etc, leading towards the predictable service or product quality delivered to the vendors, suppliers and the internal as well as the external customers.

This clearly explains why the best of the organizations across the globe have a consistent track of the way in which they conduct their business. Implementation of clearly defined values lies at the heart of all successful organizations, whether local or global.

Check-list to Evaluate Whether Your Business Is Suffering From This Anomaly

1.     Do you receive frequent customer complaints regarding quality of the product/ service   delivered?
2.    Do you find that motivating your employees towards higher productivity levels is a big challenge?
3.    Have you noticed a lack of coordination between different departments/ teams in your organization      for even simplest activities?
4.        Despite your continued efforts you are not able to build a healthy brand image in the eyes of your customers?

If the answer to one or more of these questions is yes, then your organization needs to revise its value statement by identifying its correct values and ensuring that its behavior is consistent with these values for accomplishing organizational effectiveness.

For any assistance, you may write to us at  admin@successnsynergy.com  or visit our website  www.successnsynergy.com . It shall be our pleasure to assist you..

Sanjay Sharma

7 Tips for Setting-Up Successful Retail Business

1. Know the Buying Preferences of your Target Segment

The customers are continuously looking at the innovative ways, best suited to them, for satisfying their needs. The real test lies in finding out what are they looking for. The next step is to see whether you are already doing it or not. If you are already following that practice you just need to go deeper into it to find the new depth of that practice, if this is not already happening in your organization try conducting a pilot test to learn if it really has the promise to warrant an organization wide initiative. If the pilot runs well, this is the time to see if it can either open a new insight for the marketers or it can be used to strengthen the existing offer to the market.  

2. Ensure Competitive Positioning of  Your Brand

Let the customers know what they can expect from your brand. It is not always a good idea to take competition head on, either in terms of the features or the pricing. A better option could be to work a little extra to highlight a niche feature where sufficient market exists for it and price it at a reasonable level so as to match the buying capacity of the target market, as well as leave substantial surplus on the table, for the business to fuel its motivation to carry out the project in the long run.

3. Use Footfalls Criteria to Choose your Retail Location

Where to locate your retail outlet? This is a very import and complex question. The answer to this question can be obtained either by finding a location where your target customers flock in large numbers, numbers large enough to be a true representative of the sample size capable of replicating the major characteristics of your target segment or by analyzing the presence of other retail businesses, focusing on similar target segment, indicative of successfully verifying the footfall criteria. The latter approach can prove to be a glittering death trap for your business, if such outlets are struggling to achieve their vital numbers including requisite footfall & profitability. Thus conducting first hand primary research, which may seem to be a time consuming-painstaking affair, is always a better option because it can provide you the extra dose of much needed confidence, in case the business goes through a rough patch during the initial phase.       

4. Deploy Attractive Promotion Strategy & EffectiveCommunication Tools

The customers are actively searching for special deals, promotions, clearance sales & bundled offers. This aspect of consumer behavior offers a great opportunity for retail businesses to proactively design promotions, capable of creating a favorable perception in the minds of the customers, thereby grabbing the attention of customers with a fair possibility of getting a share of their wallet.

It is seen that many a great promotions fail to create the desired customer response due to the ineffective communication tools deployed by the retailers. It is important to note that to create a promotion that can work is only one part of the story whereas to deploy the right communication tools for effectively delivering the message to the customers is a totally different ball game. For a promotion to be effective it needs to simultaneously address both these concern areas.    

5.Train your Sales Staff for Achieving  Customer Satisfaction

Customers are very demanding and they expect correct & timely resolution of their queries by the attending retail staff. The focus should not be just on closing the sales but on closing the sales through customer satisfaction because the statistics reveal that in the long run a satisfied customer would good mouth your retail business to at least three people whereas a dissatisfied customer would bad mouth your retail business to at least nine people. So decide for yourself if you can possibly afford to take the risk of creating dissatisfied customers by not having adequately trained sales staff.

Most retail organizations confuse employee training with the tons of organizational processes & product knowledge provided to their sales staff in the garb of training, resulting in information overload to which the retail employees are generally subjected. Whereas training here refers to   building the capability of the retail employees to take informed decisions in the light of the organizational process & the product manuals, in conjunction with a judicious mix of correct ettiquettes, respectful communication & customer friendly attitude ,creating a magnetic effect on the customer, resulting in repeated purchases & good mouthing to others thereby building healthy brand perception, customer loyalty & last but not the least ,the long term profitability of your retail business.  

6. Proactively Look for Customer Feedback

Customer is the most important link in the entire retail chain. If you have any doubts please review any piece of available marketing literature which keeps referring that it all starts (with identifying customer needs) and ends (with taking post consumption/usage customer feedback) with listening to the customer.

The success of most retail organizations hinges on their capability of engaging with their customers in the complete decision making cycle of the customers to foster a greater understanding of the needs and buying preferences of the customers and to know how well your retail business is succeeding in matching these needs & preferences. So if you have not yet designed  a strong customer engagement & feedback mechanism , ensure it is up & working at the lightening speed lest should you lose your hard earned customers to the other retailers , who have already put their effective customer engagement & feedback systems in place.    

7. Use Cost Effectiveness as a Measure to Evaluate Business Success.

When looking at their massive advertising spends and the mammoth customer pulls created by them, it seemed that most businesses were doing exceptionally well. In the end they came down as huge loss making businesses of all times, the magnitude of their losses defying all the justifiable proportions. It all happens when the key decision makers are overtly possessed with only any one single parameter such as market share, top line growth, geographical presence or unit sales volume at the cost of considering the whole business as a large system comprising smaller interdependent subsystems.

Before your project goes off the mark and even at all times thereafter prudence in financial management is one of the best ways towards building and sustaining a robust retail business through the crests & troughs of the business cycle.

For more information please visit our website www.successnsynergy.com. You may also contact us at admin@successnsynergy.com. The services offered by us include entrepreneurship development, project feasibility study, systems & process design, organization development, investment options and business partnerships. It shall be our pleasure to be assisting you.

Sanjay Sharma

REASONS WHY BUSINESSES FAIL?

These Reasons Emanate From the Common Mother Source

Most businesses fail to take off or fail to achieve their potential due to multiple reasons. There may be an underlying logic, to explain these failures, such as poor decision making, lack of market intelligence, not playing to your core business strengths, unprofessional approach towards business, ineffective team configuration, inappropriate business model etc, and this logic may seem to be the apparent origin of these failures, but a careful analysis reveals that most of these reasons emanate from another common mother source. This common source of business failure is the arrogance of the business owner, where the business owner considers himself to be the know all and deliberately fails to succeed by failing to recognize the key elements of the professional management approach responsible for the success of the worlds’ best business organizations.

Failure to Respect the Expertise

It is like being your own doctor, manufacturing your own footwear for personal use, teaching your kid at home instead of sending to school etc, and if such an approach is adopted it would surely take the human civilization back to the inefficiencies of the stone age, as all these examples point towards an attitude of arrogance , of disrespect towards the specialists by failing to engage them for getting their best. It is absolutely critical for the business owner to understand the scientific principles of division of labor and their linkages with the business economics, where each specialized job is handled by a specialist department or individual, but if business owner fails to respect this expertise, there is a high probability of failure as far as accomplishing the desired business results is concerned.

Is Your Business Suffering Because of Your Arrogance?

Check list to know if your business is suffering because of your arrogance

• Am I aware of my core strengths?
• Do I engage experts for business areas not falling with-in my core strengths?
• Have I identified a team of reliable business consultants?
• Do I take help of professional consultants while working outside my core strengths?

The affirmative answers to these questions indicate that you are not suffering from arrogance symptoms but if there are one or more negative answers then you need to review your business approach as well as performance.

What’s the answer?

The answer lies in improving the probability of your business success by knowing your key strengths, identifying, authenticating and engaging the source of expert knowledge for the weak-links highlighted by your SWOT analysis to take your business to the next level.

The author of this article is a consultant & trainer and may be reached at admin@successnsynergy.com for any consulting or training requirements that you may have in any of the subject areas covered in this write-up alternatively you may visit our website www.successnsynergy.com for more details

Sanjay Sharma

Improve The Efficiency of Your Sales Operations

The customers today have numerous options , normally a customer would compare you with your competitors . Therefore it is absolutely critical to fully equip your team for offering a delightful customer experience. In today’s sales warfare the customers are very demanding , the bad news is that any of your competitors offering delightful customer experience will take away the market share and the good news is that, now you know that just by offering delightful customer experience your organization can substantially improve the efficiency of its sales operations

Process Flow

The first step is to define the process flow , detailing the steps right from the first point of interaction with the customer ie. from the time lead is generated till the time the sale is closed

Sales Organization

This is a very crucial aspect, as optimum resource allocation shall be the key difference only in terms of the efficiency with which the customers are served but also the profitability of operations which in turn is affected by the cost of acquiring each new customer. Thus a sales organization must be structured to produce delightful customer experience while optimizing the new customer acquisition cost at a reasonable level.

• Recruitment of Team Members

 The detailed job descriptions must be developed based on the carefully mapped competency requirements against specific roles highlighting the applicable key responsibility areas. The recruiter must then handpick the most suitable candidates ,who are the best fit in terms of the predefined recruitment standards.

• Training For Success

 Each individual team member must be trained for their specific roles and the skills necessary in effective discharge of their key responsibilities. To be most effective the training must be done periodically and must be based on the systematic identification of training needs.

Building Proactive Controls

SOP Manual

Standard Operating Procedure(SOP) Manual is the sacred organizational document that lists the detailed steps involved in carrying out the specified processes effectively. There are numerous advantages of a well documented SOP Manual , a few of them that immediately come to mind including consistency of doing specific tasks, transparency in operations as all team members know how a specific situation needs to be addressed, faster response, professional work environment, standardization of best practices,etc. With the passage of time the newer versions of SOP Manuals are published by the progressively professional organizations. With repeated editions this document becomes an important knowledge repository pertaining to the specific organizational processes in question.

Reporting Formats

It is customary to have different reporting formats for each specific role, these are designed keeping in mind the critical aspect of the information sought and the periodicity of such requirement as suitable to the business needs of the key decision makers.

Performance Reviews

A vast majority of sales organizations conduct periodic performance reviews as a ritual, but ironically a large number of them end up building counterproductive practices and mindset  as a consequence of such exercises because of the lack of professional management outlook on the part of the managers responsible for carrying out this activity. Professionally conducted performance reviews can go a long way in improving the customer delight ,long term profitability and sustenance of the organization.

Mystery Shopping

This is an extremely important tool in the kitty of professional organizations to get a real time account of the efficiency with which their employees are interacting with their customers. The outcome of such exercises can help in bringing about revolutionary changes in the manner the sales operations are conducted

Surprise Audits

As a result of this activity , the employees are always on their toes thereby shedding the in-effective attitude mired complacency and inaction , thereby promoting a proactive and action oriented work culture.

The author of this article is a consultant & trainer and may be reached atadmin@successnsynergy.com for any consulting or training requirements that you may have in any of the subject areas covered in this write-up

Sanjay Sharma

Keep Calm And Transition To A New Development Team

It is common for a software product to transition from one development team to another during its lifetime. Different stages of the product may call for a different type of development team: a consultancy to build the initial version, a solo freelance developer to maintain it, an in-house team to bring it to scale, or a professional designer to add some “pop”.

Despite how often this occurs, many non-technical founders and product owners find themselves unprepared and scrambling when the time comes to bring on the next team. This often results in an inability for the new team to make fast progress, wasted time, and frustration for everyone involved.

If this sounds like it could be you, either now or in the future, then you should be somewhat concerned. Luckily, we are going to walk through the steps you can take to prepare for this eventuality and make the transition as smooth as possible.

Passing The Torch: Onboarding A New Development Team

In this article, I will provide you with a checklist of items that will help you prepare for such a change. You will be getting to know your product on a more intimate level and gaining more control over all the various services and technologies that go into making it, which will empower you to onboard a new team with confidence and relative ease.

Passing the torch to new developers? Make sure the new team doesn’t get burned.

But what if you’re not replacing the whole team? Should you bother reading this?

Even if some of the previous team remains on board, they might not have all the answers and information needed for a smooth transition. Although they can provide continuity and aid in the process of transferring knowledge from the old team to the new, relying on incumbent team members is no substitute for the product owner taking charge and facilitating the transfer. In addition, failing to take charge might cause friction between old and new team members, or burden old team members with unnecessary tasks, forcing them to waste too much time communicating with new team members and resolving various issues.

Still, if some team members are staying on board, they can be an invaluable asset in your transition efforts. Consult with them, keep them in the loop and try to leverage their experience without inundating them with too many transition-related tasks. Do not expect them to do all the heavy lifting! That’s your job.

So without further ado, let’s dive in!

Gather Documentation

Freelance developers are often asked to jump into an existing codebase that they’ve never seen before. This is especially true regarding Toptal software engineers. Our goal is always to get up to speed as quickly as possible so we can start having a positive impact for our clients.

Having access to clear, thorough documentation about the project can dramatically accelerate the onboarding process, and help developers avoid pitfalls that can impede forward progress.

Good documentation needs to cover at least the following topics:

• Setting up a development environment - The first task for any newcomer is getting the application up and running on their own computers. The process for doing so varies between technologies. In general, it requires tasks such as getting the source code, setting up the database, installing dependencies, configuring the environment with API keys and credentials, importing sample data, and so on. Developers have a good idea of everything involved in this process within their respective fields, and should be able to adjust the details accordingly.
• Running the automated test suite - Seeing an application’s tests pass ensures that everything has been set up properly and that future changes are not breaking any of your existing features.
• Deploying to the staging and production servers - Updating the live application with the newest changes is a highly scripted process, and the order of those operations should be outlined step-by-step, as detailed as possible.
• Any other information that is relevant to a newly onboarded developer - Every application has its own set of quirks. Writing those down saves future teams a lot of wasted effort debugging issues that the previous team has already figured out how to deal with.

Good documentation is the cornerstone of any successful transition. Make sure your new team has everything they need.

Documentation should be written by a developer who has first-hand experience setting up the application and contributing to the codebase.

Before any transition occurs, request that the previous development team facilitates the transfer of knowledge by creating a resource that touches on the topics above!

If writing is not their strong suit, ask them to record one or more screencasts demonstrating the development environment setup, deployment, etc. Today there are even tools such as Vagrant and Docker which allow whole development environments to be packaged up and distributed to others. In essence, instead of giving someone directions on how to build a hammer, give them the hammer itself.

The litmus test for how comprehensive and effective a project’s documentation is is how quickly a new developer can get his or her development environment setup and running your application.

Understand Your Product

Having great documentation does not excuse you from needing to know the basics of your own product’s technology. As the owner of a software product, it is your responsibility to understand your application as best you can, even if you aren’t very technical.

No technical background? There's no excuse for failing to properly understand the building blocks of your project. It could cost you dearly.

The following questions are common, and you should be expected to know the answers without having to look them up:

• What technology stack does your application use? - There are many common application frameworks for the back-end and the front-end, and any new development team should have familiarity in the ones your application uses. Some examples of back-end web technologies are Ruby on Rails, Node.js, and Django. Some examples of front-end web technologies are React.js, Angular.js, and Ember.js.
• Where is it hosted? - Different web hosts have different deployment processes, which require varying levels of experience. In recent years, cloud technologies have created a number of new hosting options, and you’ll need to identify which particular one you are using and describe why it was chosen over the others.
• What is the development process? - Does your team use a particular source control management tool such as Git? If so, what is the process by which a new feature gets developed, tested, approved, and deployed? The process must be standardized, properly documented, and easy to replicate by newcomers.
• What third-party services does your application use? - Some applications are built on third-party services such as Shopify. Please keep in mind that reliance on third-party services is gradually increasing, and even if you currently don’t use any extra service, your project may decide to employ a third-party service sometime later.
• What platforms can your application run on? - Is your app a desktop application, web app, responsive mobile website, native iOS application, native Android application, or anything else? Is it running on several different platforms? Which platform is your priority at any given time? Which platform is your product strongest and weakest on? Be sure to know all the details of your application’s current platforms, and even which ones it can be expanded into.

Take Ownership

Today’s software development process utilizes a plethora of third-party services and tools. Whether you know it or not, your application is no exception.

During the course of development, your previous team may have signed up on your behalf, or even used their own accounts to get access to the services that were needed. Transitioning to a new team means that you must take ownership and be in control of every single one of the services and tools that your application relies on so that you can grant access to your new team without needing to go through a middleman or chase down the original developers.

The following is a list of the various external tools or services that your application might make use of:

• Source Control Management - GitHub, Bitbucket, Gitlab
• Web Hosting - Heroku, EngineYard, Digital Ocean, Bluehost, Amazon Web Services
• File Hosting - Amazon Web Services (S3)
• DNS Provider - GoDaddy, DNSimple, Hover
• Development Services - NewRelic, FileStack, Segment, Bugsnag (and countless others)
• Payment Services - Stripe, Braintree, PayPal
• Blogging Services - WordPress, Tumblr, Ghost
• E-commerce Solutions - Shopify, Squarespace
• Analytics / Tracking - Google Analytics, Mixpanel, Kissmetrics
• Email Marketing: MailChimp, Constant Contact

Ask your outgoing development team which ones are applicable. For any services which are owned by the development team, ask them to transfer ownership to you. If that’s not possible, then ask them to help you create a new account of your own and ensure that the application uses your account instead of theirs. This should not require anything more than changing some configuration settings for your application.

Needless to say, make sure that every development contract protects your interests from day one and assures a smooth transition, no matter what.

Grant Access

With a solid understanding of the ecosystem of your application and ownership over all the various tools and services your application uses, you are now able to provide full access to the incoming team or individual.

Most services will allow you to add a collaborator to your account and grant them a particular level of access.It’s okay to be conservative here. many founders, especially solo entrepreneurs, prefer to give their developers full administrator access to their services and have them handle everything. This has the negative side-effect of keeping you out of the loop, which as we’ve learned, can make it harder to transition in the future.

Should you give your developers full administrator privileges? It’s your call, and most people don’t have a problem with this approach. However, you always need to plan ahead and make sure your decision does not negatively affect a new development team. Failing to do so in the early stages of the project can have annoying consequences in the future.

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Managing The Handoff

Now that you’ve got all your bases covered, you’ll need to manage the handoff from one team to the next. Here are some basic tips for dealing with both the incoming and the outgoing team.

Make sure you properly manage the technical and personal aspects of your project handoff. Make your new team feel at home.

Incoming Team

• Set expectations - The new team should know what your most important goals are so they can focus in the right direction. Managing your own expectations on what the new team can accomplish right away is equally important.
• Check in often - Don’t leave the new team to sink or swim. You want to check in often to make sure that they have everything they need, and don’t feel like they need to fend for themselves. Try to do this without micromanaging. Make sure they know you are there to support and help if they need, but don’t put unnecessary pressure on them.
• Be patient - It takes time for developers to get acclimated to a new codebase. Understand that there will be some learning time before the new team can match the pace of the previous one.

Outgoing Team

• Collect all outstanding code - Make sure all source code is checked into the main repository, and that you know the status of what has or hasn’t been deployed. The new team will need to know exactly where to pick up and start working. I myself have experienced a situation where I took over for a team that had deployed code without putting it in the main repository. This led to bugs, duplicate work, and headaches that could have easily been avoided if the outgoing team left the source code in a consistent state.
• Update their access level - If you parted ways on good terms, you may want to leave them with access to your code and/or deployment. Many teams are happy to help out during the transition phase until the new team can fully take over. If not, consider downgrading or revoking access to prevent any accidental issues or conflicts with the new team.
• Thank them for their work - Transitions can be hectic. While you’re busy dealing with the new team, don’t forget to thank your outgoing team for their contribution to your project.

Conclusion

Any transition in life can be scary, bringing the uncertainty of whether or not it will work out, fear of the unknown, and so on. Transitioning to a new development team is no different, but you can and should take steps to make it easier. In most cases, it just requires a bit of long-term planning.

Having a greater technical and non-technical understanding of your software product, the development process, and all the things that went into the process will help make any transition from one team to the next as seamless and painless as possible.

Best of all, your new team will respect and thank you for being on top of your game! You are likely to save them time and effort, which also means you will save money. In addition, the sooner the new team realizes insist on high professional standards, the better. Chances are they will continue implementing these practices once they take over the project, making the next transition smooth as well.

So let’s review the key points that should precede any transfer of ownership of your software product:

• Collect or create as much documentation as you can about your application, the development environment, and the deployment process.
• Know your product inside and out.
• Maintain control of all of your application’s third-party services and dependencies, and have the usernames and passwords for everything.
• Be ready to give your new team access to everything they need to get up and running.
• Be proactive and don’t leave anything to chance, or to the outgoing development team.

This article was written by Carlos Ramirez III, a Toptal Ruby developer.