Most of the opportunities we have examined in this series have dealt with financial line items or at least fairly specific concepts. In the next 10 segments we will look a little more broadly at opportunities in functional areas. When it comes to opportunities, different functional departments have similar types of issues that cause problems in the workflow. However, what’s interesting about functions is that they also have their own peculiarities based on the nature of what the function is designed to achieve. Some functions are fairly obvious in terms of what they are designed to achieve, for example sales creates sales. Sales are in turn measurable. But some functions aren’t so obvious, like marketing. There is usually plenty of debate over what marketing is supposed to achieve and even more debate about how to measure it.
In the next 10 segments we will examine some of the more common functional areas in organizations. Here are the areas we will investigate:
We’ll try to give a sense of the nature of the function and some of the general themes that are helpful to know if you are looking for opportunity. As discussed, and somewhat unlike some of the other “opportunity hunts” we’ve written about, we will focus a little more on the intended purpose or output of the function as opposed to the steps in the process.
