It’s time to deep learn how to effectively use a Virtual Assistant (VA). This learning can help you to maximize business efficiencies and opportunities, it can also have a direct impact on your business and determines how far a VA engagement can go.
The focus is to build a value chain of VA’s in which each VA contributes their core specializations to client’s business growth. This value chain needs to be governed and orchestrated from a centralized VA command centre to ensure sustainability and business continuum. The value chain can consist of differentiated VA talents and expertise who can engage and collaborate to create an ecosystem which is knowledge based and scalable.
When virtualization of work and customization of VA skills meet, the dynamics of work can change. The rationale is to offload non-core work and processes to co-create value with VA’s, co-located in the command centre and engage the VA’s to drive productive outcomes at every stage of engagement. In this context, the engagement discipline should be to focus on key junctures (Eg: Cross functional teams collaborating on a deliverable, ROI evaluation, etc) of VA delivery which can impact business outcomes. This can also enable alignment to client’s business, optimize spend on VA and revamp further VA engagements to the next level. The off load of non-core work would then enhance and multiply value for the client and when not off-loaded would become a restraint. To remove this restraint and enable a shift, businesses should interpret the role and context of Virtual Assistants and recognize ways to include them into their org culture.
What Next?
The value chain mentioned earlier in the article is an offshoot of this disruption, which will ensure effective distribution and utilization of resources. The core and non-core work should get dismantled from their tight linkage. Both shouldn't be structured together, rather they should be put into their best locations and then make them work virtually. This will enable new levels of collaboration, coordination and can alter the way organizations work and the way they create value. The Virtual Assistance command centre would divide the non-core work into various speciality areas, seamlessly integrate them into client’s business process and enable everyday delivery, the focus being to create a unified, interconnected virtual set up which is aligned to client business and delivers recognizable value.
When the work architecture of an organization is trying to enable this shift toward virtualization of work or virtual assistance, the virtual assistance provider should be able to justify the new business value or the capabilities they would enable or complement to the client’s business stream.
The COE is hence enabling connectedness, transparency and swiftness in the way an organization works. It is also a new way of engagement which can result in better consolidation of org resources. Through a COE, the organization is able to see order, structure, control and value. COE is therefore an extended enterprise working in tandem with the organization. It is a collaborative, team oriented paradigm which organizes all forms of non-core work on a common ground giving command and control to the organization to focus on amplifying core investments and differentiations.
So, what’s it about the COE? The COE is to be efficiently managed to understand the organization’s delivery requests in clear terms and should have capacity and capability to fulfil the requests in time. If a skill gap is found, on demand training programs should be driven to upskill the VA. There should be good team of subject matter experts specialized on functional skills (MS office suite, SEO, Graphic Design, etc.) for leverage and more than all a good IT infrastructure backbone that can ensure business continuity and data security. COE is a centralized and strategically positioned business arm in an organization which can be capitalized for its competitive advantage. This is possible by extending its reach across the enterprise, empowering executives to leverage the VA COE ecosystem.
The best practices while adopting COE to work for an organization includes confidentiality, security, brand protection and regulatory compliances (E.g. ISO 2005:2013), this will risk-reduce the non-core transition efforts from the org to the COE. The COE is hence a good point of shift for an organization to generate value and offers vast opportunities for Enterprises, SMB’s and Start-Ups to change fortunes, be future ready and bring more focus to core business.
If you have any questions on how to effectively leverage virtual assistant services or want to know how virtual assistants can have a positive business impact on your business, do talk to us. We would be more than glad to assist you.
Visit us at: www.brickworkindia.com
The focus is to build a value chain of VA’s in which each VA contributes their core specializations to client’s business growth. This value chain needs to be governed and orchestrated from a centralized VA command centre to ensure sustainability and business continuum. The value chain can consist of differentiated VA talents and expertise who can engage and collaborate to create an ecosystem which is knowledge based and scalable.
When virtualization of work and customization of VA skills meet, the dynamics of work can change. The rationale is to offload non-core work and processes to co-create value with VA’s, co-located in the command centre and engage the VA’s to drive productive outcomes at every stage of engagement. In this context, the engagement discipline should be to focus on key junctures (Eg: Cross functional teams collaborating on a deliverable, ROI evaluation, etc) of VA delivery which can impact business outcomes. This can also enable alignment to client’s business, optimize spend on VA and revamp further VA engagements to the next level. The off load of non-core work would then enhance and multiply value for the client and when not off-loaded would become a restraint. To remove this restraint and enable a shift, businesses should interpret the role and context of Virtual Assistants and recognize ways to include them into their org culture.
What Next?
Though virtualization of work through Virtual Assistants has been around for some time, the potential of large scale virtualization of office environments and business is yet to be explored across multiple dimensions. When this happens, it will have a disruptive and dramatic impact on org structures, its resources and operational efficiencies.
The value chain mentioned earlier in the article is an offshoot of this disruption, which will ensure effective distribution and utilization of resources. The core and non-core work should get dismantled from their tight linkage. Both shouldn't be structured together, rather they should be put into their best locations and then make them work virtually. This will enable new levels of collaboration, coordination and can alter the way organizations work and the way they create value. The Virtual Assistance command centre would divide the non-core work into various speciality areas, seamlessly integrate them into client’s business process and enable everyday delivery, the focus being to create a unified, interconnected virtual set up which is aligned to client business and delivers recognizable value.When the work architecture of an organization is trying to enable this shift toward virtualization of work or virtual assistance, the virtual assistance provider should be able to justify the new business value or the capabilities they would enable or complement to the client’s business stream.
The VA Setup
Redeploying workforce through a VA engagement is the ideal way to build a workplace that will drive efficiencies and re-architect the way people work, which in-turn can increase the speed in delivering value. When you virtualize work, you do not lose control, it is just a connected collaborative effort driven by VA’s specialized in certain skills to a specific point of value. The work can also be segregated into the ones that should be managed with vigilance and the ones that doesn’t require stringent controls. For both forms of work, you can still have the governance intact through the VA command centre and ensure you have the visibility to continually meet your business objectives.
Having a business process strategy will help in extracting the non-core from the core and also repurpose the core, since the reallocation of core & non-core is dynamic and can constantly shift, the org environment should also be flexible enough to enable it. One of the serious areas of thought in organizations is the offload of non-core tasks which are business critical and has a good deal of risk (E.g. Knowledge services like accounting & taxation and business research areas). From a higher return stand point, this will help in competitive differentiation and enable the organization in investing in next gen core processes. More precise and granular the business process analysis, better the results in reduction of any non-core process oversights, this can help in uncovering work that should be virtualized to improve productivity.The COE is hence enabling connectedness, transparency and swiftness in the way an organization works. It is also a new way of engagement which can result in better consolidation of org resources. Through a COE, the organization is able to see order, structure, control and value. COE is therefore an extended enterprise working in tandem with the organization. It is a collaborative, team oriented paradigm which organizes all forms of non-core work on a common ground giving command and control to the organization to focus on amplifying core investments and differentiations.
So, what’s it about the COE? The COE is to be efficiently managed to understand the organization’s delivery requests in clear terms and should have capacity and capability to fulfil the requests in time. If a skill gap is found, on demand training programs should be driven to upskill the VA. There should be good team of subject matter experts specialized on functional skills (MS office suite, SEO, Graphic Design, etc.) for leverage and more than all a good IT infrastructure backbone that can ensure business continuity and data security. COE is a centralized and strategically positioned business arm in an organization which can be capitalized for its competitive advantage. This is possible by extending its reach across the enterprise, empowering executives to leverage the VA COE ecosystem.
The best practices while adopting COE to work for an organization includes confidentiality, security, brand protection and regulatory compliances (E.g. ISO 2005:2013), this will risk-reduce the non-core transition efforts from the org to the COE. The COE is hence a good point of shift for an organization to generate value and offers vast opportunities for Enterprises, SMB’s and Start-Ups to change fortunes, be future ready and bring more focus to core business.
If you have any questions on how to effectively leverage virtual assistant services or want to know how virtual assistants can have a positive business impact on your business, do talk to us. We would be more than glad to assist you.
Visit us at: www.brickworkindia.com
