Strategy in practice
Start with a business decision or process that needs to improve. Agree how success will be measured, who owns the outcome and what evidence is needed before the solution can scale.
By Nitesh Chawda · Melbourne, Australia · Published
Practical questions
I would compare each opportunity on business value, feasibility and risk. A practical shortlist identifies the process owner, the current baseline, the data needed, the people affected and the cost of a wrong result. This makes it possible to choose a useful first proof rather than starting with a fashionable tool.
Include the current cost or performance baseline, the expected improvement, implementation costs and ongoing operating costs. Distinguish capacity released from cash savings: time saved does not automatically reduce the budget. Test assumptions about adoption, exception handling and support, and name the person responsible for measuring benefits.
Assign an accountable business owner and specify what the system may do, when a person must review its output and how problems will be escalated. Agree data-access boundaries, evaluation criteria, monitoring and a rollback path. The controls should reflect the consequences of failure and be understood by the delivery team.
A working demo is an early milestone. I look for repeatable quality on representative tasks, an owner who can support the process, evidence that users adopt it, and an operating cost that supports the business case. Define a stopping rule as carefully as the expansion criteria.
The process needs clear responsibilities, training and a way to handle exceptions. A technically strong solution can stall if nobody owns the changed workflow. My approach begins with education and enablement, then connects the priority problem to financial evidence, a bounded proof and staged delivery.
I have led AI & Automation at Acquire Intelligence and have worked across corporate strategy, operating models and transformation. My career profile describes the roles, while the eight-stage method sets out how I structure the work. This guide describes my approach; project results depend on the situation and evidence.
Eight-stage approach · Integration governance · Lenovo finance transformation
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