Insight-driven Consulting solutions

Strategy can mean many different things to different  people. For us it's about helping you answer some fundamental questions:

• What's your Goal, and why is it important to you?
• What are the Critical Success Factors to achieving that Goal?
• What's constraints are really holding you back?
• What are the most powerful things you can do break those constraints and get closer to your Goal?

Of course, even the best strategy is useless if it ends up as shelf-ware. Our approach will enable you to answer these questions and take your key stakeholders and people on that journey with you, so that you get shared buy-in and a commitment to implementation.

Critical  Decisions are the ones you can't afford to get wrong; the ones you might well end up regretting. Perhaps it's a major investment decision,  a change in strategy, or a big procurement commitment .

It's all too easy to get these decisions wrong. Decision-makers rarely have all the information they want and no-one has a crystal ball to tell them how things will turn out tin the future.  And yet we often must make a decision, as taking too long to decide means missed opportunities.

We can help you make the right decisions, by:

• Providing an outside view, grounded in data, to avoid group-think.
• Eliciting stakeholder input to identify problems or over-looked opportunities, and then finding ways to address them.
• Exploring the range of possible outcomes, and the likelihood of success, through integrated cost and schedule risk models.

Most organisations are constantly striving to improve but make the mistake of trying to improve everywhere at once - in every team , department, project or function.  These changes compete for management attention and other resources and often conflict; what is best for Finance may be a problem for Procurement and vice-versa. The result is that many so-called "improvements" are, for the whole organisation, just  expensive churn- not real improvement.

In contrast,  we take a whole-system approach. We will identify exactly what is holding  you back  and help you answer the key questions of: 

(a) What to change? 

(b) What to change to? 

(c) How to make the change happen?

Our approach delivers targeted, high-impact  initiatives that are cheaper and faster to implement and that quickly deliver real benefits to the whole organisation.

Systems Thinking recognises that nothing we do takes place in a vacuum. Our own lives, the projects we work on, and the organisations we work in are all parts of wider interconnected systems.  

Prevailing analytical mindsets - common in most consulting firms -  focus only on parts of the system and miss the critical interactions that make up the whole. They frequently drive local improvements that do nothing for - or even hamper - the performance of the whole system.

Famed management thinker W. E. Deming - credited with creating the now-globally-dominant Japanese  car industry - attributed 90-95% of a worker's performance to the system they worked in rather than their own individual characteristics. Given this insight, the primary role of Leaders becomes the improvement of the system.

We can  work with your leadership team to develop a shared systems-thinking mindset and associated skills, giving them the ability  to understand your system, identify high-leverage changes, implement changes targeted on these, and rapidly deliver significant and ongoing performance improvements.

Whatever you do, we can help you improve flow and throughput within your existing capacity, so that you can reliably deliver more, faster.  For projects we can tame the chaos, accelerate your critical path and deconflict demand on constrained resources.

The end result is that you will be able to deliver more, and generate more revenue, within your existing cost base, leading to increased profitability and a competitive edge.

At the heart of our approach is  is an understanding - based on Goldratt's Theory of Constraints - that the performance of any organisation or project is always limited by very few constraints. By focusing on improving these, and synchronising  the rest of your business to avoid nugatory work, we can help you very quickly make huge  gains.

To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, "A fool knows the price of everything but the value of nothing".

Our vision of good Cost Management is pretty much the opposite of this; we believe effective Cost Management must be grounded not just in what an organisation spends, but in the value it gets in return and delivers to its customers,.

We have the capability to develop, support and improve all aspects of your end-to-end cost management system including: estimating, forecasting, budgeting,  quantitative cost risk analysis, contingency management, cost engineering, supplier negotiation and development of business cases and value propositions. 

If you are in a situation where the UK Single Source Contract Regulations (SSCR) or Treasury Aqua Book apply then we can also offer expertise in applying and navigating the requirements of these.

Is risk just another process silo for you? Does your organisation do "risk admiration" rather than real risk management?  Do you identify opportunities but fail to realise them?

With our skills in risk management and quantitative risk analysis, including integrated cost and schedule analysis, we can make risk and opportunity management  a streamlined and integrated part of your business, so that you can make better decisions and get better outcomes.

Success depends on good management decisions; and good decisions depend on good information. It's easy for decision-makers to be overwhelmed by masses of poor-quality information, unable to "see the wood for the trees". Current trends for Big Data  and AI, if not carefully implemented, can make this worse.

We believe that management attention is a scarce resource and aim to reliably  provide decision-makers with exactly what they need and no more. We promote Management by Exception and modern approaches such as Critical Chain Project Management (CCPM) as well as better-known approaches such as Earned Value Management (EVM) and we know how to get the best out of each and how to successfully combine or transition between approaches.

In today's inter-connected world, no organisation is an island; every organisation's success depends on its customers and suppliers. 

We can help you align your improvements with your customer's needs to fuel your growth. And we can help your suppliers keep up, and deliver the performance you need from them.  Our aim is to always ensure win-win outcomes.

Our capabilities include focused supplier improvement, optimised risk transfer, and effective alignment of incentives, interests and behaviours.