Hacking The Strategy

The attached paper 'Hacking The Strategy' describes how it is possible to quickly build a solution to a real business problem, in order to see it is a viable strategic course of action. This is at the ‘other end’ of a previous post I have published on Digitising The Strategy. 

The real-world requirement was to find an option to improve how customer ordered packages were managed. These packages are physically small and are pre-bagged and stored for customer to be picked up. This is similar to ‘click and collect’ but with the exception that the order is usually a pre-organised subscription mixed with additional requests, plus the actual chosen products of the order are defined by the business and third parties.

As this concept was built I realised that the same solution to find the packages could also be used in the rest of the workflow to assemble the bag and also to hand them out.

The objective therefore was to quickly and cheaply mock-up a barcode solution to bring clarity as to what an enterprise solution might look like and how it might work, in order to stimulate stakeholder engagement and help strategic thinking: “Hacking a Strategy”.

The real-world win with this activity was the realisation that a solution that was hacked-up for one part of a process, could apply to other parts too. So not only was the process approach proven, so was its ability to work elsewhere.

The detailed 'Hacking The Strategy' PDF paper can act as a pattern or guidance for other such trial solutions. The choice of technologies used can be varied depending on skills and expertise, however a common set of core products could be identified to further speed-up concept realisation.