Recently I was working with a scale up where they wanted to get their managements reports coordinated so they could see the big picture of all the work being done. There were so many initiatives that were interlinked, each monthly it felt a little like playing ‘whack-a-mole’. I’ve worked on many business operating models, and the great ‘Strategyzer’ business model canvas, but there wasn’t a one page document that you could see the whole business on one page.
So we looked at taking the best of the strategyzer type canvases, the ideas from ‘capability maturity models’ and learnings from ‘product roadmaps’ into a simple 9 box traffic-light report for your business. It’s almost like the old report cards you’d get from school without all the confusing graphs – just the essence of what needs to be done.
IN the Quick Business Checkpoint we create a single page view of the business across nine simple perspectives:
- Strategic Processes: Vision & Product
- Operational Processes: Marketing, Sales, Delivery and Service
- Supporting Processes: People, Process, Technology
For each are of the business we look at four simple questions summarised by traffic lights:
- How are you doing ?
- How mature is that business area?
- What do you need to work on?
- How do you measure success?
It gives the leadership a quick overview of the business, clears out the noise, and allows the team to work out what to prioritise, and make better. The maturity question allows the leadership to decide what is right for the scale of the business. For example, with one business their delivery capability was very mature, and ready to scale, but their proposal process was ad-hoc and reactive. This would limit their potential for sales, so it was this are that needed focus in the next month.
With a one page summary, you can easily build up a month by month view of how the business is progressing. At the scale up guys, we can use the quick business checkpoint as a starting point of deciding where to focus on breaking through any growth traps, and coach the team to combine the management reports into this simple summary. Having an external perspective helps bring the detailed status of the teams into one place.
You can get a pdf copy of the Quick Business Assessment by ticking the relevant box(es) here:
