The Business Benefits of People-Centric Planning Strategies

The editors at Solutions Review have partnered with the experts at Broadcom to provide a brief overview of the business benefits people-centric planning strategies can provide.

For years, technology investments were managed and made on a project-by-project basis. Stakeholders would fund a specific project with a concrete start and end date and expect their funding to be a one-time investment. While this approach works for some projects—deploying a mainframe, installing a server frame, etc.—it’s grown increasingly cumbersome for many modern technology projects, which are rarely, if ever, “one-and-done.”

If a particular application is critical to a business, as many technologies are, it’s not something that can be deployed and forgotten about. Modern projects need ongoing support, updates, and enhancements to ensure they continue to generate the intended value, and legacy funding methods aren’t set up to accommodate this shift. That’s where people-centric planning strategies can help. With a people-centric approach, companies can fund the teams that deliver value instead of the work itself, empowering users with the agility and resources they need to meet (and even exceed) expectations without requiring them to jump through multiple hoops.

With that in mind, the editors at Solutions Review have partnered with the team at Broadcom to offer some insights into the specific business benefits people-centric planning can provide an organization with.

The Business Benefits of People-Centric Planning Strategies

Increased Visibility

Effective people-centric planning enables your teams to gain enhanced visibility into capacity planning, resource management, and risk management. With that deeper visibility, teams throughout an organization can access the in-depth insights they need to make smarter business decisions. Those insights also enable teams to fuel their continuous improvement initiatives, unlock more visibility into top-level strategies, foster cross-department collaboration, minimize business risks, and use the resulting data to prioritize backlogs and resources.

Streamlined Decision-Making

For most businesses, decision-making has been largely top-down. However, centralized power can be slow and inefficient, and the resulting rigidity can prevent teams from doing what they need. This becomes a significant problem in today’s environments, which demand an agile mindset that a single central authority cannot embody. With a people-centric approach, companies can decentralize authority to streamline decision-making without sacrificing accountability.

As long as the ground-level teams deliver value, they will continue to receive funding and support from stakeholders. Since those stakeholders receive regular metrics from those teams, they can rest easy knowing the funding is being used as intended. That’s the power of people-centric planning: it allows leaders to empower their teams, provide consistent funding, and get out of their own way.

Better Business Alignment

People-centric planning enables teams to align strategy, planning, and work across the organization by establishing optimized value streams. With this tighter alignment, teams are better positioned to connect strategy with work, reduce unnecessary friction, and foster deeper collaboration. The resulting alignment ensures that strategies are well-supported, executed, and adaptable to changing circumstances, as the workforce is more committed and responsive to the company’s goals.

Optimized for Efficiency

Traditional investment planning and project funding require users to articulate every detail of the deliverable, justify it at length, and then fund it. As a result, any changes—which are inevitable—will require that process to be restarted and repeated until it’s finally agreed upon by all the parties involved. In contrast, people-centric planning starts by ensuring all the stakeholders agree on the value being generated, which means they are more able and willing to commit to funding products and teams for the whole fiscal term.

People-centric planning lessens the threat of costly roadblocks, empowering teams to make changes on the fly, see a predictive impact of those changes, and move things around to accommodate those adjustments. With the additional efficiency this provides, businesses can improve time to market, maximize agility, and minimize the effort and overhead involved with governance, all while ensuring their organization is getting the value it needs.

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