Services.
Building the Business
Case: Discovery Phase
"Never waste a good crisis!" Crisis provides new and fertile ground for your business environment and provides the motivation to change. It makes you re-evaluate your purpose: why you are in business in the first place and how you add value to your customers. It also makes you redefine what the term ‘customer’ means to you. Is it still an external entity, or an entity within your own organisation, or something in between? Or all of the above? What does added value mean to them? These can be complex questions and not always visible from the viewpoint of your internal processes, often obscured by internal politics. An independent and unbiased consultant can shed light on how to redefine the goals in stages and how to create and sustain the motivation for successful transformation.
A customer-driven problem identification cannot be complete without an agile discovery of the situation. The situation is the environment where the problems are embedded and the mission-critical constraints manifest themselves with their underlying principal root causes. Key dependencies, and the severity of their impact on your customer's business as well as your own operations, must be identified, evaluated and quantified as a matter of standard due diligence, as part of the Risk assessment and evaluation.
Risk analysis forms the bedrock of the business case and any successful future business transactions. I can help you assess and train your teams to find the problems affecting your clients, either outside or within your own organisation, and to create a business case for each individual sales opportunity, internal improvement initiative, digital transformation project, contracting strategy, or as part of an early project plan.
A well-defined business case makes it a lot easier for the senior leadership team to pre-qualify, classify, normalise and prioritise the best projects, and to deselect the suboptimal ones. This is what the Theory of Constraints taught me: "start focusing on the right things, and stop doing the wrong things". It provides a standardised and objective framework to benchmarking and corresponding methods to assess the expected outcome from your client's point of view. Above all, it creates a win-win scenario for each opportunity in your project or sales pipeline, maximising the probability of their success. Important: the client / customer can be both external and internal to your organisation. Success must be measurable by customer-driven satisfaction metrics such as response times, deliveries, quality, productivity, velocity, flow rates, system availability, flexibility. Just as better capacity utilisation will improve your return on investment, improved customer satisfaction will increase your future bookings, improve gross margins, reduce sales cycles, and improve cash conversion rates and operating profits.
Selecting the Concept: Diagnostic & Optioning Phase
A front-end loaded agile client engagement in the concept selection stage brings specific and measurable benefits to both client and service provider. A rigorous approach to early project management and engineering resource allocation should be based on a prioritised sales pipeline. The business and project development process during the concept selection phase helps to examine viable options and to discard suboptimal choices well before any capital is committed or future organisational efforts are wasted. I can demonstrate that the implementation of an early engagement concept works for all stakeholders through the successes delivered on various projects in my portfolio.
Defining the Optimal Solution: Design & Demonstration Phase
Designing the best solution is a core competency of a successful business. This activity is often considered to be an internal, or even confidential process. I have come to appreciate the strength in creating a collaborative platform, where the client or end-user and any supply chain partner can become an active contributor to this creative process. Collaboration and information sharing can accelerate the effective demonstration and validation of the solution that best fits the customer's objectives. As with early engagement in the diagnostic phase, closer co-operation in design can make the final decision maker more confident that your solution will deliver the desired outcome, and that changes can be implemented well before the project execution phase reducing the risk of exponentially escalating remedial costs. I can support you and your organisation with the creation and frictionless implementation of such collaborative strategies.
Delivering Specialised and Personalised Advisory Services:
Delivery Phase
I am a change agent and a creative thought leader. As an independent advisor I can provide personalised and confidential consultation and facilitate conflict resolution. I can coach and train your team in small or mid-size groups or provide one-to-one tailored guidance and mentoring. I am able to help unblock creative thinking through unbiased dialogue and the use of visual mind-mapping tools and other model-based approaches (TRIZ, Evaporating Cloud of the Theory of Constraint, De Bono method etc.). Without undue peer pressure or potentially overwhelming supervisory oversight, I can serve as an objective sounding board for team members when discussing new ideas – crucial for uninhibited innovation and organisational learning.