How to bring together and industrialise business operations and project activities

We understand your frustration on reading new or proven methodologies and frameworks full with tons of benefits, improvements and integration advices and then surprisingly you are struggling to implement them into your real-world business. Very often the problem is not caused by wrong selection of business and operational models but lies in the absence of processes to multiply and deploy these benefits into your day-to-day activities.

„Neo, sooner or later you are going to realise, just as I did, there’s a difference between knowing the Path and walking the Path…“ Morpheus in The Matrix franchise, 1999

This publication will be a bit bizarre for those of you who are expecting to read one more article with recommendations for using particular models, tools and standards. However, I would like to focus your attention on the key word „industrialisation“ by giving you an example with the widely used BizOps model and the proven enterprise standards ISO 21500:2021 for strategic, portfolio, programs and projects management. Furthermore, deliberately I will not use any names of companies or software automation and collaboration solutions for two reasons - firstly, to keep this body of knowledge ad-free, and secondly, because I am considering that the software of your choice should be selected on ground of the particular requirements related to your work environment. So, let’s dive in this topic with a brief introduction.

The industrialisation of business operations and services as a term is taken from the classical production lines and aligned with the modern business needs and demands for operational and project-oriented activities. In this sense, the industrialisation should be considered as a set of processes and procedures designed to automate, standardise and enable enterprises to continuously improve their Quality of Service (QoS) by optimising the production and the delivery costs.

The paradigm of the business industrialisation lies on the concept to define and deploy  sequences of bottom-up delivery activities that can be applied multiple times for a selected business model in a transparent manner. When designed properly, the industrialised business processes provide higher visibility and flexibility to reuse your operational workflow in order to improve your current products and services or to create similar deliverables without jeopardising the sustainability and trust of your business. Furthermore, the industrialisation cut-offs the overall Cost of Quality (CoQ), improves the maintenance experience, improves defects management and control, and significantly improves the scalability of your product and service delivery. And last but not least, the industrialised processes are back-office and customer ready by nature.

There is a small catch, however, you need to have an operational business model already in place in order to commence a transformation for industrialisation. For the purpose of this article I will consider using BizOps model as a strategic and decision-making framework.

Why BizOps is chosen, you may ask. I wouldn’t waste your time with generic principles and approaches designed from scratch how to commence strategic and business decisions, I suppose. Consequently, I have selected one widely accepted framework that brings together the day-to-day business operations, project activities and technological functions. BizOps framework is also cross-functional, works well between the business units and the project teams and shines with its ability to drive easy initiatives, such as process improvements, increasing profits and the overall customer delivery satisfaction, into a competitive and collaborative environment.

The second important reason to search for a flexible and ready-to-go business operations model is to utilise the ability of BizOps to align the strategic goals to the best technology and daily practices across the company.

• Firstly, this approach may improve effectively the change management strategy and eventually the industrialised policy;
• Secondly, the alignment brings better team traction and coordination between IT and business units;
• Thirdly, I am looking for a business framework that will guarantee the continuous improvement process required for successful industrialisation, and
• Finally, BizOps serves as a lightweight standardised framework for stipulating easy to understand ground rules across the company.

During the industrialisation of the BizOps in your organisation you will face two major groups of challenges:

• About the transformation of your operational and team work activities, and
• About the standardisation of your project, program and portfolio activities.

One possible approach to commence operational transformation is to deploy an agile model based on BizOps framework:

• Enhance the matrix organisation of the company by providing larger and more exhaustive access of the business operations (BizOps) teams to the data aggregated and managed by all organisation units;
• Increase the transparency of the data exchange and data tracking. There are plenty of options to normalise the tools and the data formats, to automate the document version controlling, and to add and control more access privileges to different operational groups and so forth;
• Design and deploy the decision support communication and operational systems on different business levels, for example, between the finance, sales, marketing teams and the product owners, delivery, maintenance and R&D teams;
• Unify the data exchange for the qualitative and quantitative operational and technological analyses generated by all business units. Here you can use variety of software document management and analytical systems, for example… sorry, I will keep my promise not to share particular software products;
• Clearly distinguish the strategic goals, expectations and management approach of the day-to-day operations from the project activities across the organisation. Do not intermix operations and projects in order to acquire the business benefits efficiently and faster. To industrialise this approach try to plan, execute and convert the result of successfully completed projects into operational workflow;
• Build the BizOps teams on ground of their abilities to secure the continuous improvement of the organisation. It is essential the BizOps teams to master their communication, problem solving and analytical skills with cross-functional stockholders on all levels within the organisation or external to the organisation;
• The BizOps professional must have well developed project management skills.

As explained above, the business industrialisation requires automation and standardisation of all project, program and portfolio endeavours within an agile and collaborative work environment managed by BizOps teams. This topic has a huge scope not only for explanation but for deployment as well. To handle it properly you will need a complete set of enterprise standards to cover all topics from the definition of high level objectives, management principles and communication rules to detailed guidance how to apply these principles onto project, program and/or portfolio activities.

There are several recognised standards and methodologies for professional portfolio, program or project management, such as ANSI/PMI 99-001-2021 or PRINCE2. For the purpose of this article, however, I am looking for a solution how to standardise the enterprise activities as a whole, not independently or on a personal practitioner level.

To power-up the BizOps industrialisation I will recommend using ISO 21500:2021 as a family of enterprise standards in the field of strategic, portfolio, programs and project management.

ISO 21500:2021 is bunch of the following core standard documents:

• ISO 21502:2021 — Guidance for project management;
• ISO 21503:2022 — Guidance for programme management;
• ISO 21504:2022 — Guidance for portfolio management;
• ISO 21505:2017 — Strategic management principles;
• ISO 21508:2018 — Earned Value Management.

The industrialisation of ISO 21500 lies on an agile approach and fits fluently into your BizOps environment. The following diagram shows how the projectized work can be incorporated with your strategy planning, day-to-day business operations, stakeholders initiatives and ultimately managed by the BizOps teams in collaborative environment across the organisation.

Four main principles are stipulated by ISO 21500:2021 in the context of industrialised BizOps environment:

1. All day-to-day activities are commenced by relatively consistent and small teams that perform all continuous tasks in order to secure the organisation sustainability;
2. Projects are considered all time-limited endeavours and as such are executed by temporary teams build across the organisation in order to deliver successfully complete products, services, functional elements and other benefits that can be multiplied back to the day-to-day activities. One project may exist as independent endeavour within the BizOps organisation, or as a part of larger program or portfolio;
3. The programs are groups of projects, managed in synergy and coordinated way in order to deliver and/or utilise strategic and operational benefits to the organisation that wouldn’t be achievable if the projects were commenced separately;
4. The portfolio is a collection of projects, programs and other related operational work undertaken for contributing to the implementation of the organisation's strategic goals.

This standard is highly oriented towards clients and stakeholders. The presumption is, as stipulated in A.4.3 and A.4.4 of ISO 21500:2021, that the external environment is the key factor to bring benefits and improvements to the organisation and back to the stakeholders and the clients. This includes but it is not limited to:

• Exploiting benefits as a result of final products, inputs and outputs from projects and programs for external stakeholders;
• Exploiting opportunities and avoiding or mitigating threats arising from economic, political, social, technological, legal and environmental constraints;
• Managing expectations and requirements of government, customers, suppliers, contractors, business partners and other the public entities;
• Commencing projects in cooperation with multiple organisations.

Furthermore, ISO 21504:2022 as subsidiary standard to ISO 21500, recommends to perform KPIs and metrics for project and program selection and measurements of the business success in BizOps environment, such as:

• Return of Investment (ROI);
• Net Recurring Revenue (NRR);
• Internal Rate of Return (IRR); 
• Benefits Categorisations and Cost Ratio (BCR);
• Risk assessments (acceptable levels of negative and positive uncertainty events);
• Strategic goals levelling and deviation analyses;
• Resource availability;
• CSAT (Customer satisfaction) and VOC (voice of the customer) analyses;
• and more… much more!

Ultimately, the BizOps team for strategic decisions acts as a cross-functional steering group or Program and Project Management Office (P&PMO), and is responsible to drive the project and program initiation, monitoring and control.

The industrialisation approach of BizOps powered by ISO 21500:2021 includes the following standardised integration business polices, stipulated by A.4.6 of the standard. In a nutshell:

1. Strategic harmonisation — all portfolio, program and project activities must be aligned with the organisation strategic goals and objectives. This should be so obvious and yet so often completely overlooked;
2. Consistent justification and compliance — the standard promotes any policies for continuous validation and risk assessment against the strategic goals of the organisation. BizOps frameworks perfectly fits to this approach by securing transparency and data-unity across the organisation teams and units;
3. Stakeholders engagement — the stakeholders identification and categorisation is the primary task alongside with the feasibility study required for project (ref. ISO 21502:2021) or program (ref. ISO 21503:2022) initiation. This integration statement requires all products, results and other output elements from projects/programs to be negotiated and confirmed by the key stakeholders, such as the Sponsor. This statement does not contradict with any agile approach, like delivery roll-outs, daily Scrums or other. Even if the final product is not predefined, the standard requires all items within the product back-log to be negotiated before any implementation;
4. All roles and responsibilities to be in place — in other words, let’s work together in collaborative environment, but with clearly defined roles and visible responsibilities. This integration statement is very often misunderstood as fixed roles and responsibilities, especially in cross-functional BizOps environment. To help you understand the concept, consider you may have different responsibilities across the organisation by working on different projects or programmes (like PM, BA, QA, EVM Expert and so on);
5. Proactive planning and operational management — the concept behind this statement is to guarantee the final success of your projects, programs and portfolios by providing active and adequate to the company’s strategy planning and quality assurance;
6. Continuous improvement — the standard promotes, in full conjunction with the BizOps framework and Kaizen quality management philosophy, transparency on commencing results analyses from the project, programs and portfolio activities, and gathering, collecting and sharing lessons learned across the organisation.

In conclusion, an integrated and collaborative approach for business industrialisation  using the BizOps framework for day-to-day activities powered by ISO 21500:2021 bundle of standards for strategic, projects, programs and portfolios management would contribute to:

• General understanding of the organisation's strategies, goals, plans and roadmaps created within the BizOps collaborative environment;
• Emphasising on the realisation of strategic goals of the organisation and the benefits exchanged with the external environment and the stakeholders;
• Improving the transparency and alignment of the BizOps teams with the strategic objectives;
• Improving the overall transparency on the resources selection shared across the organisation for day-to-day operations and projects, programs and portfolios. This would be a key benefit and prerequisite for creation of HR pool into BizOps environment;
• Enhancing and automating the communication between the BizOps teams;
• Providing bottom-up consistent reporting and automated data aggregation for high level decision-making.