Doris Yip
None at Freelance
As an executive CFO and transformation leader, I build, scale, transform, and integrate companies when the stakes are highest. Over my 25+ year career, I’ve delivered billions in financial...
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- Transforming Businesses with Financial Acumen: Strategies to leverage finance for growth
- SaaS Transition Management: Best practices transitioning to subscription models
- Effective M&A Strategy and Integration: Ensuring successful mergers and acquisitions
- Driving Revenue Growth through GTM: Optimizing go-to-market strategies for profit
- Leadership in Operational Excellence: Cultivating high-performance teams and processes.
Meet the mentor
Tricky Workplace Situation Handled
- Innovation is an ongoing act for any company. In my experience, every associate should look for process improvements and find ways to do things more effectively and efficiently. That to ensure we continue to find ways to innovate. Innovation comes in process, product and people and thought process & decision making. Most company focus on product development for innovation which is critical. However, there are innovation in how things are done at work and the way of working is also as important. As company scale, the process becomes more complicated and there are more layers of management for approval, overtime company takes longer to respond to changing market and customer needs. Company has to be agile to move faster and keep up with the market and innovation is the core of how business is run.
- I think there are ways to help Maya to spend time with family but also energized by her work. One suggestion is to do a special project where she is allowed to work from home but given time to work on the project independently. That will boost her confidence and creativity and looking at ways to solve a business problems while she is home with her kids. That could be one day a week for her to work from home. The other options is as she look at her career aspiration while maintaining family balance, she can start exploring other roles as job shadowing to see if this is time for her to explore other functions in the company. Growth and continual learnings super important for career growth. I think those two options can be explored to see which one fits her career objectives while meeting business demands.
- Positive: it is nice to have a private space in the office and also able to see your team members to promote collaboration. Negative: For creative work as a designer, having the space on their own and able to work from home which gives me the flexibility to work in the park to get inspiration from the nature or just be alone to stimulate creativity is critical for creative work. In addition, that provides more flexible hours to work from home. The company can choose a hybrid approach that not everyone has to be in the office whole week and might be give them one day a week to be offsite that goes a long way. Honestly after the pandemic, remote working environment is promoted, and I have seen productivity gain in my team. For creative work, highly recommend hybrid working environment.
- Currently I am working on taking the company from License model to SaaS. This fundamentally change the way of doing, working, supporting clients and employees. To innovate, it first has to have a vision of why and rally people behind it and make sense to them. Once the team is onboard, we will have to lay out the foundation areas to innovate. Often times, we can speed up to go to market to sell a new innovative product in this case SaaS. However, the challenge is often the backend support from operation, finance, customer support to change the way how we support our clients and building the process and system in place is where we can fall short. This could be a multi-year project and could be overwhelming. One way to boost innovation is to start with a pilot which gives flexibility to innovate in a defined scope
- I would start with a mock project to help the student identify the key steps to ensure that we have a framework to boost innovation. I will guide them thru questions, and they come up with the answer.
Tricky Workplace Situation Handled
- Innovation is an ongoing act for any company. In my experience, every associate should look for process improvements and find ways to do things more effectively and efficiently. That to ensure we continue to find ways to innovate. Innovation comes in process, product and people and thought process & decision making. Most company focus on product development for innovation which is critical. However, there are innovation in how things are done at work and the way of working is also as important. As company scale, the process becomes more complicated and there are more layers of management for approval, overtime company takes longer to respond to changing market and customer needs. Company has to be agile to move faster and keep up with the market and innovation is the core of how business is run.
- I think there are ways to help Maya to spend time with family but also energized by her work. One suggestion is to do a special project where she is allowed to work from home but given time to work on the project independently. That will boost her confidence and creativity and looking at ways to solve a business problems while she is home with her kids. That could be one day a week for her to work from home. The other options is as she look at her career aspiration while maintaining family balance, she can start exploring other roles as job shadowing to see if this is time for her to explore other functions in the company. Growth and continual learnings super important for career growth. I think those two options can be explored to see which one fits her career objectives while meeting business demands.
- Positive: it is nice to have a private space in the office and also able to see your team members to promote collaboration. Negative: For creative work as a designer, having the space on their own and able to work from home which gives me the flexibility to work in the park to get inspiration from the nature or just be alone to stimulate creativity is critical for creative work. In addition, that provides more flexible hours to work from home. The company can choose a hybrid approach that not everyone has to be in the office whole week and might be give them one day a week to be offsite that goes a long way. Honestly after the pandemic, remote working environment is promoted, and I have seen productivity gain in my team. For creative work, highly recommend hybrid working environment.
- Currently I am working on taking the company from License model to SaaS. This fundamentally change the way of doing, working, supporting clients and employees. To innovate, it first has to have a vision of why and rally people behind it and make sense to them. Once the team is onboard, we will have to lay out the foundation areas to innovate. Often times, we can speed up to go to market to sell a new innovative product in this case SaaS. However, the challenge is often the backend support from operation, finance, customer support to change the way how we support our clients and building the process and system in place is where we can fall short. This could be a multi-year project and could be overwhelming. One way to boost innovation is to start with a pilot which gives flexibility to innovate in a defined scope
- I would start with a mock project to help the student identify the key steps to ensure that we have a framework to boost innovation. I will guide them thru questions, and they come up with the answer.