We are a Niche consultancy with the ability to provide both short-term consulting engagements and Interim managers focused on Digital Transformation at any stage of the journey from strategy development, to solution design, organisational and process integration, systems a and data integration, cultural change and migration from the old to the new.
We have twenty years experience of delivering transformations in businesses of all sizes from local to global from manufacturing to eCommerce and the Public Sector.
We can provide a skilled associates to help you with specific needs, we can provide an Interim to work with you on delivery, or we can help you find an employee or Interim, but making sure you identify the skills and qualities needed and pre-screen candidates before you see them.
We can work with your existing teams to improve their performance through a combination of coaching and training to help you strengthen the team.
Digital Transformation
What we are referring to is the continual drive to capture some of the benefits of digital tools and mindsets to gain business advantage and stay ahead of rivals in your marketplace, or if you are a public-sector organisation, to do more with less while reducing, or controlling the stress on your workforce.
First it was books and Music, then Media and products, Nothing will escape the changes driven by the digital age. The average lifespan of a company quoted on the S&P 500 has been reduced to a few decades as disruptive technology disrupts and overtakes the slow movers. It is our goal to help keep our clients amongst the leaders of change. The beneficiaries not the victims.
The terminology may have changed from time to time, but the goal has changed little in three decades. Some of us are ruthlessly grabbing every tiny advantage in a drive to conquer all, while the majority of us are striving to maintain our position in the face of ever increasing pace of change and continuous demands from customers . The only difference is a mindset. Regardless of your own business goals and capabilities we are here to help.
We have been driving digital transformation since the Mid Nineties from the early websites with a few animations to eCommerce businesses that reach every corner of the globe and can deliver within hours from the first electronic mailshots to an artificial brain that schedules a workforce minute by minute and mile by mile every day with flawless efficiency.
How we think and what we believe in
We focus on our ability to identify cause and effect, identify the right problems and define solutions that address the problem holistically. Let me put that in simple language:
1. You are already an expert in your domain and you probably don’t need us turning up claiming to know more and telling you how to run your business. Instead we listen to your needs, take your guidance and apply our skills and models to identify the problem together. Vertically aligned consultancies, i.e. those who focus inside a single vertical try to create all solutions from their idea of an ideal mould and nobody ultimately is happy. We specialise in analysis and problem solving, we provide the guidance and the models, we provide the analysis and data and apply best practice, but it is down to you make the final decisions, because it is you who has to make it work going forward.
2. We prefer to pass on our skills and methods and equip you to do it yourself. Naturally if there is urgency and no time for skills transfer, we can deliver a packaged solution, but we prefer when possible to develop your team by working alongside them so that you develop not just the solution, but the capability to deliver your own solutions more effectively.
3. We view both problems and solutions as a holistic domain involving knowledge, skills, motivation, culture and tools. We discover the problems in this context and we define solutions in the same way so that no stone is unturned to ensure a successful outcome.
4. Though we are bound to falter once in a while, the aim is to speak to people in language they understand. That means we try never to preach Jargon to someone concerned only with business, but we are more than capable of getting down and dirty with systems suppliers on your behalf.
How we help?
We don’t arrive with a package deal, but rather adapt to your expressed needs as far is reasonable. The only barrier to doing exactly what you want from us would be if we knew it was unlikely to succeed for whatever reason.
- We can help your people to identify the biggest opportunities and evaluate the cost and rewards and your ability to deliver. Best opportunity can be measured by your criteria, for example it might be the quickest wins or the biggest returns, or any other criteria and we can develop business cases and costings or perform Proof of concept exercises.
- We can provide full-time interim(s) or short immersive engagements to plan out delivery, address capability and capacity needs and help address gaps to ensure a successful delivery.
- We can manage succinct aspects of delivery such as procurement, QA/testing, process design, user journeys, back journeys, agile training and coaching, or PMO/QA services.
- We can help ensure that today’s improvement does not become tomorrow’s barrier. By this I mean enterprise architecture, i.e. making sure that poor decisions about systems or infrastructure made today without foresight don’t hamper your aspirations for tomorrow or prove incompatible and need to be retired early.
- We can integrate an offshore workforce with management and communication processes to reduce your costs going forward.
- We can provide on or off-site QA and PMO services at a level to suit your need thus adding an objective mindset into the equation and bringing broad experience to the table.
How to engage with us
It all begins with hello, please just put a contact number or email address into one of the forms and we will reply with an email confirmation and an invitation to arrange the most convenient way to start a conversation.
We don’t have a formal sales function nor a formal sales process, you will get to speak to a real-life consultant who will try to match you to the best person to discuss your subject area. The following is a loose framework, but is more of a starting point than a rigid framework
Step one. Agree ground rules, i.e. how you like to e contacted or not as the case may be. What sort of answers would you like to achieve, are you and I are a good match for this purpose and how what is the best approach to achieve your immediate goals in terms of working together .
By the way, we assume that your first question is going to be about whether you feel comfortable working with us at all, so don’t allow that to bother you, we totally understand.
Step two. Agree an initial approach and an output format. E.g. “We will do a preliminary investigation of the problem you described, have a face to face and telephone calls as required and on “date” we will present a conclusion about what should be done and the alternative approaches. By “Date” you will decide if you want to continue and how”.
- If your requirement simply is to provide you an interim manager or coach for a time, or to deliver a training course, then this can be a very straightforward and lightweight process, but nevertheless the principles would remain the same.