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The Toolkit for Business Success launching in 2008 for the first time in Jacksonville area - professional business development training seminars with the small and medium size business in mind.
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Developing Strategy for Small Businesses – April 10, 2008 and September 10, 2008
Many businesses, large and small, do not have a strategy for making their organizations more successful. This course will help you go about formulating and communicating the direction in which you want to take your organization. Some courses are a survey of other companies’ strategies; this offering centers on how to build YOUR strategy.
There are a lot of reasons strategic planning does not take place, among them are:
- Viewing planning as a theoretical exercise, with no real payback
- Equating strategy with budgeting
- Being reasonably successful without one, so there must not be a reason to do this type of planning
- Spending all the time managers are together to solve problems, not plan
- Simply not knowing how to go about strategy development.
Strategy helps organizations focus, both on what to do and, just as importantly what NOT to do. So strategic planning can be a very practical use of time. What if you could:
- Make your life easier as the leader of your organization and improve the effectiveness of your organization at the same time?
- Have a built-in rationale in place for most budget or operational decisions?
- Avoid numerous problems instead of spending time solving them later?
- Develop a much stronger understanding of who your customers are and what they want from you?
- Have an efficient vehicle for teaching your management team what truly drives the business that helps you with succession planning?
- Do this with a very reasonable investment of your time?
This one-day course is structured to help you go about formulating and communicating the direction you want to take your organization. Some courses are a survey of other company’s strategies, this offering centers on HOW to build yours.
Who can extract value from this session:
- Owners, Presidents or CEOs of small to mid-sized businesses
- Executive Directors of non-profit organizations
- Leaders in government positions who have a strong sense of “customer”
- Decision makers who have the authority to shift organizational direction
At the end of this seminar, you will be able to:
- Assess your organization’s capabilities and shortcomings objectively
- Determine critical elements of your business environment that can threaten or promote your success
- Analyze the motivations your customers use to make buying decisions
- Select a planning formulation technique best suited to you and your group
- Develop straightforward ways of making sure your strategy remains the focus of the organization
Seminar Outline
- Good plans versus bad plans
- What strategy is, and isn’t
- How strategy fits in with goals and projects
- Environmental Assessment
- Impacts of government, technology, labor, vendors and capital
- Self-Assessment
- How to do your own SWOT analysis
- Competitive Analysis
- Customer Analysis
- What drives buying decisions
- Key Concepts
- The value of targeted marketing
- The role of switching costs in developing strategy
- Recognizing channels to the customer
- Selecting the best strategy development technique
- Internally focused strategy
- Externally focused strategy
- Making your strategy work
- Assessing and communicating your strategy
- Care and feeding of your strategy
- “Deadly Sins” of strategic planning
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$450 (Breakfast and lunch included) |
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Process Optimization – May 9, 2008
Processes, or the activities that your business performs to meet your customers’ expectations, are the backbone of your organization. Often, those processes are inefficient, broken or simply not designed to keep up with the growth you are experiencing. This seminar presents a “tool box” of process analysis and optimization techniques to help you identify and address the critical business issues that truly impact the success of your business.
Learn when and how to apply these tools to:
- Enhance your bottom line performance
- Better anticipate and meet your customers’ expectations
- Take advantage of new opportunities as they arise with more adept processes
At the conclusion of this class, you will have learned how to:
- Identify and understand your organization's true core processes
- View customer/supplier relationships and their impact on your system
- Select the “right” processes for improvement initiatives
- Recognize and remove activities that do not add value
- Eliminate system flaws that result in poor quality
- Use process maps to give direction to your quality improvement efforts
- Predict the success or failure of a business improvement initiative
- Understand how processes interact in a system
- Locate process flaws that are creating systemic problems
- Evaluate which activities add value for the customer
- Mobilize teams to streamline and improve processes
- Dramatically improve your efficiency and customer satisfaction
Who Should Attend?
- Operations directors, managers and supervisors
- Quality assurance or internal audit officers
- IT managers and directors
- Logistics, planning and procurement officers and managers
Course Outline
- Understanding Systems Thinking
- Establishing the process boundaries
- Defining customers and suppliers of the process
- Documenting the expectations and determining if there are current gaps to the process
- Establishing the process performance baseline
- Process Mapping
- Introduction to and application of various mapping tools
- Understanding criteria to determine which tool(s) to use
- Capturing the “current state” of the process
- Identifying incremental and redesign improvement opportunities
- Capturing the “future state” of the process
- Identifying what should be measured in the process
- Preparing for implementation of proposed changes
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$450 (Breakfast and lunch included) |
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Developing Your Balanced Scorecard – August 15, 2008
Having a clearly defined strategy is the first step. However, the strategy will only be effective if you use it to manage your business, monitoring and adjusting performance to achieve the strategy. This seminar will help you identify, define and implement a set of performance measures that will guide you in evaluating your organization’s performance relative to your business strategy.
How a Balanced Measurement System Can Drive Sustainable Strategic and Operational Success
"What gets measured gets done." It’s a business axiom you’ve heard a thousand times. Unfortunately, the things most companies measure (short-term financial performance and local productivity) don’t determine long-term success in a competitive marketplace.
In order to achieve and sustain strategic success via operational excellence, your performance management system must align and balance:
- Financial metrics - How well your company meets the owners’ needs
- Customer metrics - How your customers view you
- Business process metrics - How well your core processes produce value
- Internal resource development metrics - How your company learns and grows
In 1992, Robert Kaplan of Harvard Business School and David Norton of Renaissance Solutions introduced the Balanced Scorecard (BSC), a complement to traditional financial measurement systems that helped companies manage performance and progress. This tool has evolved into a strategic management system that can help you achieve and sustain strategic success as the business environment changes.
Using the Balanced Scorecard will show you how to apply and adapt this system at your company. Specifically, you will learn how to:
- Adjust the four BSC perspectives to your environment
- Link and align operational and strategic objectives
- Select measures that provide the ability to influence, evaluate and achieve fulfillment of the strategic objectives
- Create a framework to integrate the overall BSC throughout the organization
- Identify and implement sustainable strategic improvements
Course Outline
- BSC Basics
- Components of a BSC
- Roles and responsibilities
- Development and implementation steps
- Keys to success
- Strategic Objectives
- Defining the objectives
- Evaluating and building strategic alignment
- Testing strategic objectives for sufficiency
- Defining BSC Measures
- Developing initial list of measures
- Defining the measures
- Testing and refining the measures
- Deploying the BSC
- Gathering the measurement data
- Refining the measures
- Using the BSC as a critical management tool
- Linking to compensation and performance management
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$450 (Breakfast and lunch included) |
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Project Planning – October 10, 2008
Projects are an inevitable part of every business. Projects planned and executed using sound proven principles will save you money and time. This seminar will provide the fundamentals you need to plan projects effectively. **This seminar is approved for 8 PDU credits by the Project Management Institute (PMI) and Florida Board of Engineers.
You Will Learn How To...
- Understand how strategic plans will affect project selection
- Select the high impact projects and abandon low-return projects
- Understand the project management life cycle and phases
- Apply tools to effectively and thoroughly plan the project
- Use tools to plan for managing multiple projects
Seminar Outline
- Overview
- Characteristics of Success
- Triple Constraint Theory
- Roles and Responsibilities
- Process Groups
- Getting Organized
- Project Initiation
- Project Selection
- Prioritization Matrix
- Project Charter
- Statement of Work
- Communication Plan
- Project Planning
- Work Breakdown Structure
- Estimating
- Resource Evaluation
- Risk Planning
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$450 (Breakfast and lunch included) |
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Building Effective Business Requirements – September 17-18, 2008
Business requirements must clearly define what the system is supposed to do in order for any new system development to be successful. This seminar provides a broad range of business analysis skills that will help you extract the right information from the business users and to create the requirements to support the design, development, testing and deployment of your new system.
How important are effective business requirements? Studies have shown that at least half of product defects originate in the requirements. As much as 80 percent of rework on a system development project can be traced back to requirement defects.
In today's environment, where every system dollar is scrutinized and squeezed, one of the greatest improvement opportunities for an IT organization (small or large) is in defining the requirements correctly.
Regardless of the development methodology, business requirements must clearly define what the system is supposed to do. This seminar addresses a broad range of business analysis skills that will help you extract the right information from the business users and create requirements to support the design, development, testing, and deployment of successful system solutions.
Program Benefits...What You Will Learn:
- The business analysts' role in requirements gathering
- Analyze business processes to determine business requirements
- Harvest business need information from the user community effectively
- Create thorough and useful business requirements
- Use case and modeling techniques that can help hone requirements
- Integrate business requirements into a variety of system development methodologies
- Establish a traceability protocol to link business requirements to design, development, testing, and deployment activities
- Link requirements to business needs
Who Will Benefit:
- System Analyst and/or Manager
- Business Analyst and/or Manager
- Technical and QA Analyst
- Operations Manager
- IT Manager
- Project and Development Manager
- Requirements and Design Engineer
Seminar Outline
- Importance of Requirements
- Why Requirements Are Missed
- The Costs of Missed Requirements
- IIBA Knowledge Areas
- Project Management
- SDLC/Methodologies
- Requirements Development
- Process Flow
- Types of Requirements
- Selecting the "Right" Requirement Level
- The Requirements Process
- Requirements Elicitation Tools and Techniques
- Interviews
- Brainstorming
- Affinity Diagram
- Focus Groups
- Questionnaires
- Observation
- People Information Techniques
- Process Techniques
- Benchmarking
- Requirements Documentation
- Documentation Sources
- Document Contributions
- Use Cases
- Requirements Styles and Situations
- Context diagrams
- Domain or physical models
- Data dictionary
- Dataflow diagrams
- Data models
- Entity relationship diagrams
- Tasks and support
- Scenarios
- Event or function lists
- Process maps
- Task descriptions
- Screens and prototypes
Validating and Finalizing Requirements
- Contents Check
- Validation Checks
- Characteristics of Effective Requirements
- Requirements Traceability
- Verification
- Keys to Success
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$850 (Breakfast and lunches included) |
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Seminar location: Hampton Inn at 9A in Jacksonville, FL
Dates: As listed above subject to additions or change.
Times: 9:00am – 5:00pm
Special pricing for Jacksonville Chamber Members:
$395 or $795 if reserved and paid 14 days prior to seminar date.
Visa, Mastercard, and American Express accepted.
Make checks payable to Step By Step Consulting, Inc.
Mail to: 8515 Baymeadows Way Suite 301A, Jacksonville, FL 32256
Seats are limited so reserve your spot now!! |
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