How Technology Assessment Can Take Your Business to A Whole New Level
The best strategy to win a war is knowing yourself better. When you know your strengths and weaknesses, you can improve your situation by turning your weaknesses into strengths. The same thing happens when you're a business owner or run an organization.
To keep your business on the right track and win the race against hundreds of thousands of competitors, you must know yourself first. Here, technology assessment comes to play its role.
How?
Well, technology assessment is a form of policy research that examines the short and long term consequences of your every initiative. As well as, it can give you an overview of your company's current state so that you can revamp your business again.
Let's unveil to you all the points that you need to know about technology assessment through this article.
Why Should You Seriously Consider about Technology Assessment for Your Business
As you know, technology assessment covers a vast area from IT assessment like cloud, network, security to business assessment like gap analysis, competitor analysis, and many more.
This blog post is dedicatedly planned to help out those who want to perform a technology assessment on their eCommerce, SaaS, online product, and service selling businesses.
The reasons behind adopting a technology assessment for your business are enormous. Let’s discuss some of the key points of it.
- Identify Your Position: As you know, the first step to getting to where you want to be is knowing where you are. A well-performed business technology assessment will indicate the exact position of your business by analyzing your competitors. Then you can apply your creativity and team efforts to surpass your competitors.
- Define Goals: Without having clarity between short term and long term goals, things can be worse. Let your employees know the deadline of a project. But before that, it is crucial to make yourself aware first, and the business technology assessment output will let you know the expiry date of every goal.
- Find Out Your Lackings: Sometimes, we can not see a hole in a football without having a thorough look at it. In the same way, we often overlook our lackings when we don’t take intensive care of our business. A business technology assessment will help you to have an intensive checking of every angle of your business.
- Embrace Ideas to Overcome: When you are aware of your lackings, no one can stop you from overcoming those flaws. Take the necessary steps and apply them in the shortest possible time taking help from business technology assessment analysis. The output of the assessment will indicate you what to adopt and what not to adopt.
A Technology Assessment Checklist for Entrepreneurs
A business technology assessment is a complete review of all your organization’s management and performance. Unless you have performed a full business technology assessment, you could be heading for trouble without not even knowing it.
Once you get a comprehensive view of the state of your business, it will be easy to identify areas of enhancement and make strategic business decisions. By being proactive, you will be able to catch the problems early and implement the solutions early as well.
However, before applying a technology assessment on your business, you need to be prepared with a checklist. Your checklist should reflect what you are going to do and how you will do that successfully. Let’s make a business technology assessment checklist.
1. Competitor Analysis
How often do you review competitive products?
Your assessment should start with competitor analysis. You know, every day, a massive number of people are starting online businesses with new plans and strategies.
Moreover, a considerable amount of people are running ahead of you with the same niche. So, you need to find out their lackings and improve yourself.
First, make a list of your competitors. Then, find out their strengths and weaknesses, though finding vulnerabilities is not an easy job at all. Check everything from site loading time to product quality.
Once you are ready with your list, it must be reviewed by a management team for a strategic response or adjustment based on the new information.
2. Assessment of Current State
Now it's time to find your current state. The goal of this phase is to comprehensively realize the strategy, services, infrastructure, and applications being provided to the organization.
You need to start analyzing the existing business strategy and find out whether it needs an update or not.
Sometimes, entrepreneurs don't even know why you're stuck in the same position though you have a perfect website with fast loading time. Maybe the problem is with your business strategy like you don't know who is actually your consumers and somehow can not reach them.
To get a better conversion rate, adopt a strategy that takes care of the consumer's psychology, and find a way to outreach as many as possible.
Don't let anything hold you uplift your business. Remember, the sky is your limit.
3. Network Assessment
In this phase, you will start checking all the network issues. Set a team to measure and analyze performance in all servers, network components, and workstations to ensure it is meeting business requirements.
You need to look at how the technology is being applied at a granular level. What’s more, you should look at how it’s being worked around or misused.
It would be great if you have a better in-depth understanding of your existing environment and current network. So that you can create an adequate budget to align with your business needs and goals.
It is your responsibility to manage and grow your business with industry-specific recommendations identified through your IT team’s assessment.
4. Gap Analysis
Most small and medium-sized business owners tend to practice the break-fix approach when running their companies. This means they only handle their problems when it happens, which can be detrimental to their business’ interests.
It would be much better if you enlist all the gaps and work on it rather than a break-fix approach. In this phase, you have a report of your competitors and know your current state. Now, compare those two and find out which part of your business needs to be revamped.
Unlike every phase, this phase will decide how far or less you will go depending on your analyzing capability. So, our suggestion is to take your time and prepare the best analyzing report for a better output.
5. Recommendation List & Task Assigning
By the end of these phases, as mentioned above, you should be armed with information about where you are now and where you want to go. Since you have a good understanding of the problem, and the goal, you should be able to make a recommendation list and assign people to implement according to their expertise.
Sometimes problems start with your team too. As a business owner or team leader, you should check whether your team members are misusing their existing stack rather than using it to its full potential.
You should suggest some perfect tools for managing this colossal work correctly. In the upcoming para, we are going to share some of the great tools that can come handy for you.
6. Planning The Implementation
Now you need to build out your implementation plan for the end state. It’s not just about what problem you’re looking to solve, but more specifically, how you are going to solve these problems.
Make a thorough implementation plan and set a deadline for every goal. One common problem we see in this stage is a misalignment of the works. For instance, do not assign a marketing team for product development and vice-versa.
Business Technology Assessment Tools to Manage Your Tasks & Team
When you are ready with the implementation plan and already have assigned tasks to different teams, you need a project management system for a seamless working flow.
The best thing is that it keeps your team organized and on schedule. Let’s choose a project management tool for you.
#WP Project Manager
WP Project Manager is a smart solution for managing any type of small or big projects. It comes with both free and premium versions to make you more productive at work. Already more than 10,000 people are using the WP Project Manager free version. Using this project manager, you will be able to ensure the best use of your resources and planning.
At this phase, you need such a project manager that can properly organize and track all tasks and projects. WP Project Manager does precisely the same thing; in addition, it will help you to meet your deadline more efficiently.
With its advanced and smart features like a time management tool for efficient time tracking, advanced reports for full insights about everything will make your work more relaxed than ever before. So, make your team collaboration more effective and go a step forward than your competitors.
#WP ERP
WP ERP will help you to take control of your company’s finances in real-time. It will let you manage customers, vendors, sales, expenses, and various reports like an all in one solution. Project management software is also integrated with it to manage your works more effectively.
WP ERP also comes with both free and pro versions. WP ERP free is the first full-fledged ERP system through which you can simultaneously manage your WordPress site and business from a single platform.
Unlike other ERP software, WP ERP comes with more than 20 extensions & Project Management Module. It generates live and detailed reports and makes transactions, generates invoices, and pays employees all from a single place. It optimizes your small to medium businesses with powerful HR Manager, CRM & Accounting tools.
#Panorama
Panorama is a project management tool that comes with an easy to use and user-friendly dashboard. It will let you assign the project processes from the WordPress dashboard. It will help you to track all your project activities through a common platform. As a result, you will be able to easily track and summarize your project details with this WordPress plugin.
With Panorama you can visualize the project status instantly. Each of your team members will get their own dashboard to view their work in progress. This dashboard is totally customizable. Panorama comes with beautiful and simple charts to present the reports.
Analyze the Results for Further Technology Assessment
After choosing a project management tool and applying all the business technology assessment procedures, we can certainly say that you have received the results. Now, one more step is left.
The final step is to put all your work down on paper in a well-documents plan so that you can avoid hassle later. Your final document should include;
- A high-level overview
- A crisp explanation of what you are solving and what you are asking for
- All the details of the implementation and deployment
- Details on project timelines and ownership.
This documentation will be handy when you would prepare for another technology assessment for your business.
Summary
Follow this easy and impactful technology assessment to supercharge your business again. Don’t let anyone hold you back in the race of eCommerce business. Find out your gaps and fill them with expertise.
Let us know your feedback through the comment box below. We would love to hear from you.
