Strategy Operations Consulting

Our professionals are focused on enabling your organization to achieve and sustain desired performance results.

This includes support for the development/ refinement of Organizational or Program Vision, Mission, and Objectives.We also support the ongoing development and implementation of Performance Management and Measurement.

Our organization has the necessary experience to provide guidance on Organizational Alignment, enabling effective decision-making.

Our Strategy & Operations practice includes a focus on Operational Efficiency, Effectiveness, and Process Improvement. Our process improvement services effectively integrate concepts in control assurance, balancing the need for efficiency with the existence of key controls to reduce risk.

Finally, our practice also focuses on the intersection of technology and business, delivering Business IT Strategy services. We assist in improving business performance through sustainable IT capabilities and infrastructure, and through the creation of effective business IT strategic & operational plans.

Strategy Operations Consulting

Our professionals are focused on enabling your organization to achieve and sustain desired performance results.

This includes support for the development/ refinement of Organizational or Program Vision, Mission, and Objectives.We also support the ongoing development and implementation of Performance Management and Measurement.

Our organization has the necessary experience to provide guidance on Organizational Alignment, enabling effective decision-making.

Our Strategy & Operations practice includes a focus on Operational Efficiency, Effectiveness, and Process Improvement. Our process improvement services effectively integrate concepts in control assurance, balancing the need for efficiency with the existence of key controls to reduce risk.

Finally, our practice also focuses on the intersection of technology and business, delivering Business IT Strategy services. We assist in improving business performance through sustainable IT capabilities and infrastructure, and through the creation of effective business IT strategic & operational plans.

Risk & Regulatory Consulting

Supported by a variety of tools and methodologies, our professionals can assist in the design and implementation of an Enterprise Risk Management program. These services include a systematic approach to assessing your organization’s maturity with respect to risk mitigation strategies and processes.

We conduct business Operational Reviews and Program Assessments to determine operational efficiency; governance and accountability structures, and risk/control effectiveness. Our assessments focus on determining whether an organization’s network of risk management, control and governance processes are well-designed and operating as they should.

Our team of professionals is qualified in IT Systems Control Assurance and Information Risk Management. Areas of specialization include IT Governance, Data Quality, Information Management, Business Continuity, Data Protection and Privacy.

Project and Portfolio Management

Using the Project Management Institute’s body of knowledge and processes, our professionals deliver outstanding project and portfolio management services.

We work effectively to establish project and program management offices, project management processes, governance and reporting structures.

Our team works collaboratively with our clients to manage project risks, enabling on-schedule delivery and the realization of expected benefits.

We have extensive experience with portfolio management, running multiple projects and timelines to assist in the delivery of program services.

With the intersection of our performance management practice, our team has the necessary experience to integrate project/portfolio reporting with key performance indicators and metrics.

Business and Program Strategy

Johnson and Scholes in Exploring Corporate Strategy define strategy as follows:

"Strategy is the direction and scope of an organisation over the long-term: which achieves advantage for the organisation through its configuration of resources within a challenging environment, to meet the needs of markets and to fulfil stakeholder expectations"

There are a number of factors that will determine the effectiveness and ability of an organization to develop a viable and meaningful strategy. The incremental steps include:

• Articulating the long-term direction of the business (where is the business trying to go);
• Defining the market and/or scope of business (markets to be in/services to deliver and the activities required to do so);
• Documenting the business’ advantages and performance goals;
• Identifying and aligning resources to these goals (skills, assets, relationships);
• Understanding the values and expectations of stakeholders and business owners; and
• Identifying road blocks to success and developing a path forward.
  

We know that good strategy results from a constant flow through the three steps necessary to address the previous questions: Strategic Analysis, Strategic Choices and Strategy Implementation. All three are required, and changes in any one of these factors requires a review of the impacts to the other activity domains.

Our professionals have the experience to assist with strategies at all levels of a business/organization, including:
Corporate Strategy - is concerned with the overall purpose and scope of the business to meet stakeholder expectations. This is a crucial level since it is heavily influenced by investors in the business and acts to guide strategic decision-making throughout the business. Corporate strategy is often stated explicitly in a "mission statement".

Business Unit Strategy - is concerned more with how a business competes successfully in a particular market. It concerns strategic decisions about choice of products, meeting needs of customers, gaining advantage over competitors, exploiting or creating new opportunities etc.

Operational Strategy - is concerned with how each part of the business is organised to deliver the corporate and business-unit level strategic direction. Operational strategy therefore focuses on issues of resources, processes, people etc.

We are able to develop the strategy, recommend appropriate governance and control models to execute against the strategy, establish performance benchmarks and key performance indicators, reduce risk and improve performance.

Business and Program Strategy

Johnson and Scholes in Exploring Corporate Strategy define strategy as follows:

"Strategy is the direction and scope of an organisation over the long-term: which achieves advantage for the organisation through its configuration of resources within a challenging environment, to meet the needs of markets and to fulfil stakeholder expectations"

There are a number of factors that will determine the effectiveness and ability of an organization to develop a viable and meaningful strategy. The incremental steps include:

• Articulating the long-term direction of the business (where is the business trying to go);
• Defining the market and/or scope of business (markets to be in/services to deliver and the activities required to do so);
• Documenting the business’ advantages and performance goals;
• Identifying and aligning resources to these goals (skills, assets, relationships);
• Understanding the values and expectations of stakeholders and business owners; and
• Identifying road blocks to success and developing a path forward.
  

We know that good strategy results from a constant flow through the three steps necessary to address the previous questions: Strategic Analysis, Strategic Choices and Strategy Implementation. All three are required, and changes in any one of these factors requires a review of the impacts to the other activity domains.

Our professionals have the experience to assist with strategies at all levels of a business/organization, including:
Corporate Strategy - is concerned with the overall purpose and scope of the business to meet stakeholder expectations. This is a crucial level since it is heavily influenced by investors in the business and acts to guide strategic decision-making throughout the business. Corporate strategy is often stated explicitly in a "mission statement".

Business Unit Strategy - is concerned more with how a business competes successfully in a particular market. It concerns strategic decisions about choice of products, meeting needs of customers, gaining advantage over competitors, exploiting or creating new opportunities etc.

Operational Strategy - is concerned with how each part of the business is organised to deliver the corporate and business-unit level strategic direction. Operational strategy therefore focuses on issues of resources, processes, people etc.

We are able to develop the strategy, recommend appropriate governance and control models to execute against the strategy, establish performance benchmarks and key performance indicators, reduce risk and improve performance.

IM/IT Strategy & Management

g2 Management Consulting Inc.’s IM/IT strategy and architecture services are designed to assist your organization in gaining insight into the current state of your infrastructure and identify opportunities for advancement, innovation and cost efficiency. Creating business value through IM/IT requires a clear understanding of business requirements and a realistic roadmap with defined steps to improvement.

IM/IT is a business inside of a business, with the objective of satisfying client needs within defined resource and budgetary limits. Drawn from our experience on many projects, we use accepted standards and methodologies, reusable reference architectures and IT service delivery models to improve your business. The goal is to ensure that IT strategy is clearly linked to the overarching business strategy and operational objectives of the broader organization that IM/IT serves. Ensuring that information is appropriately controlled while meeting service demands is where we place our focus, using recognized and accepted frameworks such as the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL), Control Objectives for Information and Related Technology (CobIT) and related ISO standards.

Our Information Management services enable our clients to maximize the efficiency with which they plan, collect, organize, use, control, store, disseminate and retain/dispose of information. We assist in the identification of the risk and value of information so that appropriate management methods can be enable, maximizing the value of information while ensuring data protection. Our Enterprise Information Management methodology is based on international standards and best practices, and includes business alignment, risk/value assessment, architecture, taxonomy/classification design, lifecycle management, security, privacy and disposition scheduling. Privacy and data protection throughout the organization are key components of our information management approach, and include threat/risk assessment, privacy & access impact assessments, security assessments and controls design. We assist in ensuring that information is securely delivered to the right person, at the right time for the most appropriate business purposes. Our goal is to align information with the business needs of the organization and to enable IM to respond to changes in the business environment.

Enterprise Risk Management

There is a fine balance between risk management and business value within any organization. Our services enable your organization to control risk through the integration of risk management best practices into business strategy and operations. We have the knowledge and experience to assist in the development of enterprise-wide risk management programs, line-of-business risk management strategies or risk management within IM/IT systems. Our risk services can address strategic, operational, technical, organization, financial and project-related risks; we can help your organization integrate risk management into everyday business processes.

Control Assurance Services

We can assist our clients to identify, assess, design, implement and test internal controls operating within business processes and IM/IT systems. These services can be delivered as part of an internal controls/control assurance project, or as part of an internal audit. Control assurance is an important consideration during process redesign or the implementation of new IT systems. We can bring considerable expertise to manage risks during these types of initiatives.

There is a high degree of dependence between business cycle controls and automated/ IT controls. Information systems depend on work processes, and this dependency can create significant risk if controls are not well designed and operating. If controls have not been properly designed in an IT environment, they can produce incomplete, inaccurate or invalid data. Controls need to address the integrity, security, reliability and consistency of manual and automated processes. In the IT environment, security risks, threats to data quality, risks to privacy and information integrity must all be considered.

Our consulting team can undertake the development of governance structures, internal control policies and procedures, and the design/implementation of various process and system controls. We ensure alignment of control assurance projects to the broader corporate risk management program.

IT Governance & Risk Management

Our IT governance solution uses industry standards and methodologies to improve oversight of the IT portfolio, including human and financial resources. We can assist the Chief Information officer (CIO) to align the IT strategy to the business strategy of the organization, maximizing value while managing risks. We create customized frameworks based on accepted models such as COBIT® and ITIL®. Our team also has the necessary experience to assist in the definition of benefits realization and value measurement frameworks to assist IT in documenting success.

IT and Operational Internal Audit

Most organizations need a comprehensive, planned approach to managing risks and vulnerabilities within the business and IT environment. Many organizations today have made strategic decisions to hire specialized operational and systems-audit professionals on an ad-hoc basis, as required by the multi-year internal audit plan.

Our practitioners have the necessary internal audit and IT audit expertise to compliment your existing staff. We have professionals with the CISA designation (Certified Information Systems Auditor) that can provide services focused specifically on technology risks. In addition, we have a highly experienced team in business operations internal audit and assessment, including the ability to assess/transform the financial management function.

Project and Portfolio Risk Management

Many large projects face the risk of substantial overruns, operating complications and staffing challenges. The task of designing and executing against a realistic project plan can be daunting; however, successful projects consider risks up-front and actively manage a risk log throughout the project.

With expertise in risk management and professionals with the PMP designation, we can assist your organization to manage risks to the achievement of project goals. To achieve a successful project outcome, it is essential to understand the project and related business process risks at the outset, and to plan for their active management throughout the project lifecycle. The goal is to enable on-schedule delivery of a high quality project that realizes expected benefits outlined in the business case.

Program Transformation & Execution

In order to implement strategic/programmatic initiatives requires strong co-ordination and leadership. Achievement of business objectives doesn’t just happen – it requires planning and managing in accordance with a blueprint, using tried/tested tools and standards. Typically business environments (markets, competitors, technology) are dynamic/evolving so the strategy and the program must change in a managed and disciplined way. And, organizational leadership already has the responsibility and pressure of successfully growing and maintaining the daily business. As such, they need experienced support dedicated to manage the strategic program.

Programs by their nature are complex and traditional management principles and structures don’t work. To ensure disciplined and coordinated execution of the portfolio of strategic projects across the business requires: effectively allocation of scarce resources to the program, meaningful oversight of program status and issues, program adaptation to satisfy changing business requirements and priorities, program related organisational change and benefits realization, pro-actively identification and management of program level risks and issues

The underlying basis of the Program Office role and approach is to ensure that expected outcomes and benefits are realized from multiple change initiatives. This dimension identifies benefits at the outset and maintains the focus on their delivery throughout the life of the program. The relevance of a set of benefits is often not judged at a program’s inception and is certainly not reviewed as the program progresses. Consequently, few projects and programs deliver to expectation, and when they do, quite often the business has moved on, and they are no longer as relevant. The range of benefits to be delivered from change initiatives should be viewed in their totality from a strategic stance. Without taking this total view, there is a danger that different projects could be addressing the same benefits or, worse still, might not be addressing the right benefits at all.

As improvement opportunities aimed at realizing strategic objectives are identified, prioritized and planned, it is critical that the employee and organizational structures are appropriately aligned with the proposed changes and that change management criteria is built into the recommendations so as to ensure a smooth and successful transition in an expedient manner. These perspectives are critical to realizing rapid change. In our experience, uncertainty and misunderstanding lead to resistance, which can quickly bog down any change initiative and effective change management is essential.

Through our experiences in strategic/programmatic transformation with local and global clients, we have had the opportunity to reflect on our successes and shortcomings. Below we have outlined five key learnings that we apply to current and future projects.

Think big, but start small

Transformational change requires a compelling, inspirational vision. The implementation of that change requires breaking the vision into achievable steps, determining the correct sequence and dependencies, and identifying checkpoints at which to stop, take stock, and correct your course. We have learned that this is increasingly important as business and technological change speeds up, and we have found that developing a roadmap to achieving a vision is the best approach to ensuring we stay on course while focused on particular steps along the way.

Integrate technology, people and process

Successful business transformation is increasingly dependent on people, process and technology being combined to deliver change. We have learned that the traditional approach of dealing separately with ‘technology’ ‘process’ or ‘human resources’ within a programme no longer produces the right results. We are responding to this by applying our capabilities in all three areas to develop and utilise new frameworks for transformational change – to enable us to work more effectively as integrated teams.

Invest in understanding the problem

A critical component to developing an approach to transformational change, and to getting it right, is to ensure that we have understood the problem completely and correctly. We have learned that it can seem easier to understand a problem ‘anecdotally’ and move to the solution – but this always costs time and money in obtaining buy-in, prioritising efforts and making informed decisions in later phases.

No cookie-cutter approach

While we utilise proven frameworks and tools within our business transformation framework, we have learned that no programme is exactly the same. Our tools and frameworks provide us with robust starting points to think about change, but we need to ensure that we work with you to develop an approach that is fit for purpose. We have learned that it can be tempting to apply a ‘tried and tested’ approach to a problem, but that the right approach is generally not the same.

Don’t over commit or under-resource.

Every organisation has resource constraints – both in the people that can be offered to a transformational change programme, and in the financial commitment to external resources to coach and lead. We have learned that we need to be clear in our advice to you – to provide your best people for transformational change, and to ensure that external resource coverage is sufficient to stand by our commitment to you to deliver successfully.