It is no longer news that the COVID-19 pandemic impacted all business strategies developed pre-pandemic either negatively or positively. Some organisations activated their Business Continuity Plan (BCP) or Emergency Response Plan (ERP) to keep business afloat; some emerged better while some collapsed.
Historical intelligence generated to date became almost entirely useless. Virtually all business and competitive historical analyses became non-applicable.
For Agile organisations, two critical questions arise:
How do we align our Business Continuity Plan with our current business strategy?
And,
How do we recover lost implementation time due to the disruption caused by the pandemic?
According to a survey carried out by Statista in April 2021, the main worry among business owners and administrators in Nigeria was liquidity and the availability of infrastructure for remote working. Most organisations had to transform digitally to support business continuity.
The pandemic has highlighted gaps in many organisations regarding their strategic preparedness and ability to respond to disruption quickly. It also revealed that many organisations do not adequately consider disruptive scenarios while developing their business strategy.
The good news today is that there is now a real-time opportunity to reinvent the way you do business and set yourself up to come out on the right side of disruption.
The pandemic has been a wake-up call for organisations that haven’t been deliberate in building resilience into their operations. Given the disparity between prepared organisations versus not prepared, one could argue that being operationally resilient should be a core and differentiating capability to invest in going forward.
In this time of unprecedented disruption, organisations need to:
Rethink the process by which they define and operationalise their business strategy,
Widen the process options available to the strategy function
In today’s corporate business environment, the benefits of scoping a business continuity plan (BCP) in alignment with an organisation’s overall strategy cannot be overemphasised. This will ensure that business objectives, targets, strategic initiatives, timelines, and processes related to delivering essential products and services of the organisation are considered carefully. As a result, this alignment significantly impacts corporate performance and helps the organisation achieve its goals and objectives.
At pcl., Strategy alignment and strategy management are two areas we excel in. We understand the importance of having an aligned Business Continuity Plan incorporated into an organisation’s corporate strategy for robust business operations.
We offer a complete portfolio of strategy and operations consulting services to assess, design, implement, exercise and maintain the maturity and sophistication of your Business model.
Engage our strategy consultants by sending an email to strategy@phillipsconsulting.net
Written by:
David Edozie Onochie
Senior Analyst
