At the start of 2020 I posted a blog relating the year 2020 to 2020 eyesight in terms of clarity of vision and purpose (https://timitsolutions.com/does-your-business-have-2020/). As we now know 2020 brought clarity to the world in some painful ways. So what have we learned? Furthermore, what have those learnings done to better prepare us for such a catastrophic event?
To name a few the 2020 COVID Pandemic brought clarity to things like Quality of Life, Supply Chain Risk, Digital Awareness, and WFH. On the business side technology both served to enable WFH and made business leaders realize the value of digital processes. But as memories begin to fade it is important that we do not lose sight of the lessons we learned. Furthermore, investments necessary, or even mandated during the pandemic need to be decided not on by ROI but by business continuity before tossing them aside. So what is the right decision for your business when it comes to being reasonably prepared, and adequately profitable?
If you are in the insurance industry you live and die by how effectively you manage risks. Even those that are unpredictable. But for the rest of us the challenges were eye-opening. Visualizing risk preparedness, risk mitigation, and issue resolution can help bring clarity. And working through the thinking-doing cycle can be an effective help. In business, the thought is not what counts. Action is what drives positive results.
To be most effective your actions need to be proactive, not reactive. To do that takes forethought to develop a plan of action (PoC) before the SHTF. Although this takes time, developing the PoC is simple. Extra time will be needed to establish the readiness to exercise those actions as soon as they are needed. Create a simple PoC as started here. And complete it with representation from your functional leadership, and operations folks. That way you will include a diverse sense of risks and how to manage them.
| Risk (what events can happen) | Avoidance (thoughts on how to be prepared for what may happen) | Abatement (Actions to take if events do happen) | Issue Resolution (Contingent actions if abatement is not enough) |
| Supply Disruption | Establish Inventory reserves and alternate/local supplier relationships. | Engage inventory reserves and alternate suppliers. | Proactively manage PR and customer relationship management. |
TIMIT has mastered Risk Abatement from a project perspective and has developed tools to plan and automate proactive actions. If this is of interest give us a shout, or schedule time on my calendar to discuss this further: https://calendly.com/tim_montgomery/business-it-discussion-with-tim-montgomery