Organisation

Our approach is to build a performance improvement or new venture project around one or more Business Planning Days - workshops with the management team that need to own the project and its deliverables.

These may be half-days or full days, and we recommend that they take place off-site, although if time is tight, it may make sense to hold an initial half-day session on-site.

These will be used to present analysis in an interactive way, ideally using a modelling tool, to discuss and evaluate options,  to agree priorities and to set milestones and accountabilities.

Our starting point is normally to confirm or clarify the vision.  What do you stand for? What are you seeking to achieve? This may already be clear to you, or it may require some work.  If it needs work, we have a framework for helping this process called the 3 Cs framework (illustrated below). This has been used effectively on a number of projects to help management teams think through what is distinctive about what they are and do as an organisation, and whether they are organised effectively to deliver this. 

Team dynamics is a critical element in implementing any plan effectively, and we will work with you on this.  While the analytics work may take weeks, or just a couple of days, regardless, we need to have met each member of the team in a one-to-one setting to understand individual perspectives.  We can then make sure we design the Business Planning Days for maximum effect.

The organisational deliverables will be a combination of:

  1. New insights.  The highlights of these  projects can be what we call the "AHA" moments. "AHA, I get it!".   We are keen to try and deliver these, as it can be where the crunch of the value comes.  Typically, it is the combination of analysis, our experience and the dialogue that we facilitate that can lead to these insights.
  2. New capabilities.  We aim to bring expertise which your staff can acquire - this may be costing or business intelligence techniques, or indeed new ways of running projects or meetings.
  3. Changed organisation structure and/or processes.  We expect that re-designing your structure or processes to some degree, will be key to realising cost savings or improved effectiveness.  Just like plants, organisations that grow organically unchecked are generally not optimally efficient, and require some amount of pruning.