Our Consulting Solutions
Strategic Planning and Resource Alignment
Many companies are operationally strong, but lack a realistic, credible, coherent vision that defines a destination, or future state, that is shared by all members of the organization. This shared vision is an absolute “must have” for driving future organizational performance. There is tremendous team development value in having team members go through this kind of exchange and agree on a shared vision and a shared strategic direction. At CPBN we use The Institute Way or the 9 Steps as the methodology for our strategy workout sessions (see below).
The process leads to a new level of understanding and communication that cascades throughout the organization, connecting people’s hearts and minds to the vision and strategic direction, and cultivating a new strategic thinking culture throughout the organization.
If your organization would like to:
- Develop and agree on plans that can be executed.
- Create “commitments” that will support the achievement of your strategic goals.
- Reduce the “churn” associated with the annual planning process by using top-down targets to drive the budgeting process, with corporate goals cascading into goals of key business and functional units.
- Operate in accordance with the performance commitments that have been made in support of your organization’s strategy and monitor progress in their achievement.
Our consultants will provide the thought leadership and experience to assist in the implementation of a “best practice” approach to Strategic Planning & Strategic Achievement.
Our 7s Organisational Readiness Assessment
The approach that we take to organisational transformation is holistic rather than “transactional” and is based on the McKinsey 7-S model which posits that to effect sustainable organisational transformation, changes must be effected to all significant dimensions of an organization as shown below.
You may have reached a consensus on the overall goal for your organisation (shareholder/stakeholder value or citizen satisfaction) and agreed on your strategies and the pathways to achieving your goals; however, the Structures and Systems that must be put in place and the Skillsets that are available to the organisation that are the “enablers for reaching your destination, while the organisation’s staff (the energy source) and its Style, the way things are done and the source of motivation will be the “energisers” that propel the organisation to its goal.
Any organisation can be looked at through the lens of the 7S model and the interconnectedness of the 7S elements makes their alignment even more critical for the success of your organisation. That interconnectedness means for example that a change in strategy will invariably require changes in some or all the other 7S elements.
We will assess your readiness for this transformation journey through the lens of this important diagnostic instrument.
Business Process Optimisation
For us at CPBN Business Process Optimisation is the fundamental re-design of an organisation’s processes (Core, Support and Managerial) to achieve dramatic performance improvements in the areas of cost, quality and cycle time and overall satisfaction of both external and internal customers.
We challenge all existing assumptions, paradigms and ‘sacred cows,” that influence the ways in which critical processes are currently executed in your company, paving the way for the radical rethink and redesign of how “the business” is conducted.
This reshaping of business processes will usually have an impact on your organisational structure, information technology, physical infrastructures, and your corporate culture.
Guiding Principles
Our Fact-Based Transformation is a fully developed transformation methodology that can be applied to redesign specific business process, or to transform and/or combine an entire organization.
The emphasis on working with the “facts” is about ensuring that at the start of the process, our clients clearly understand all the dimensions of process performance including resource consumption, so that at the end of the transformation process stakeholders can gauge the level of shareholder value created because of the transformation exercise.
Using ToP Facilitation skills, our consultants will discover and document your company’s Business Activity Model or Process Classification Framework, (the set of Core, Support and Management Process) through which your company’s business objectives and overall goals are achieved.
We will them be able to map using the Business Process Mapping and Notation (BPMN) standard who current does what, how and when in your organisation, and use this “as-is” process analysis as the input for the redesign and optimisation of your company’s “to be” processes.
Requisite Organization Design
Requisite Organization (RO) is one of the very few management systems that links all aspects of a business to ensure the:
- The right organization structure,
- The right people in the right jobs,
- The right accountabilities for results; and
- The right managerial leadership practices
Requisite organization design principles achieve this by ensuring that:
- Your organisation has the optimal number of layers in the structure and well understood cross-functional relationships.
- Jobs (organisational roles) are positioned at the right reporting level in the organisation and that employees are matched to jobs based on their capability, shilled knowledge and their ability apply the knowledge to work assigned.
- The work (organisational problems) assigned to employees is commensurate with their levels of capacity.
- There are clear roles, accountabilities, and authorities.
- Employees assigned to managerial leadership roles can add value to the work of their staff and that the dysfunctional consequences of organisational compression and organisational gaps are avoided.
- Assessment methods and a talent pool system are in place to identify the best people for hiring and promotion and supports effective career development and succession planning.
By applying Requisite Organisation Design principles our consultants will develop organisation structure recommendations that grounded in best practices and with the assessment of your staff’s current and future capability, we will ensure that the right people are placed in the right jobs, that development requirements are identified and that there is a process for ensuring that the organisation has staff with the required capabilities to fill key roles in the future.
People Alignment through Competency-Based Management
To achieve your organisation’s Mission and Overall Goal(s) it will be your staff’s ability to apply the required job-related skills in the execution your company’s business processes that will allow them to effectively perform the work of the organization.
However, it will be the competencies or the unique intrinsic qualities possessed by your staff, that will allow them to apply the job specific and functional skills needed to achieve the company’s Mission Vision and Goals.
Our consultants will facilitate the development of a competency framework (see the example below) that is appropriate for your organisation, given the nature of the work that must be performed.
We will also facilitate a consensus on a capability rating scale for your competency model and guide the development of a “competency dictionary” that will describe the behaviours that staff will need to display at each level on the capability scale.
With the development of your competency model and associated competency dictionary our team will work with your organisation to agree on the “job families” that exist withing your re-designed organisation structure and then arrive at a consensus on the competencies and levels of capability that will be required for each of the job families that will have been established.
Your completed competency model will then be in place to underpin several of the key processes (see below) that are required to align your people with your strategy and overall goals.
Job Evaluation Services
A critical step in your company’s transformation journey will be to first assess the value to your organisation of each role recommended in the redesigned organisation structure. This step is mission critical if roles are to be positioned at the right organisational level so that it is clear to all staff that there is internal equity in how that value of their roles have been assessed. A best practice job evaluation methodology will avoid the demotivating impact associated with low perceptions of internal job equity and will also avoid the dysfunctional performance outcomes associated with:
- “Organisational gaps” – where there is too large a gap in intellectual capacity between managers and their direct reports, or
- “Organisational Compression” – where there is little distinction in the capabilities of a manager and his/her direct reports and the manager is therefore unable to carry out that key role of adding value to the work of his/her staff.
At CPBN, we have a team that is expert in the use of the HAY Points Factor Job Evaluation system as well as in the development of position/job descriptions in the format required for HAY job evaluation. We will transfer these skills to your team through experiential learning as they participate of the development of JDs and the evaluation of selected roles in your company. However, the CPBN team will as a panel, evaluate and then review the majority of jobs in your company, always with input for the manager or the manager once-removed to whom the role reports if there is any lack of clarity about any dimension of the job
Based on the Requisite Design of your organisation structure, our team will recommend the Job Grade (Group) structure and the corresponding job evaluation score ranges that will determine where any job is positioned based on its value as assessed by a Job Evaluation panel.
Compensation Planning to support effective people alignment
Once your job evaluation exercise has been completed, the CPBN team can assist your organisation in establishing pay equity with the external market in which you compete for Human Capital resources and then employ best practices in establishing the compensation ranges for each Job Group/Grade that would have been established for your company.
These best practices principles relate to:
- Establishing the width of each pay grade to reflect the reality of an organisational pyramid and the fact that staff will have to stay longer in a role as they make upward progress through the company. The application is best practices to this critical area will minimise the early “red-circling” of staff and both the demotivation impact on employees and the dysfunctional that develop in order to pay “red-circled” staff more money.
- The degree of overlap in the pay ranges for job grade and the mid-point to mid-point progression that is established as a policy.
The establishment of “pay-equity” with the external market is a key strategic decision that will impact your company’s ability to attract and retain staff the level of capability required to execute the organisation’s processes. Your company is competing for these resources in the external market and the establishing the segment of the labour market that is relevant for your organisation is a critical decision so that the percentile positioning of your compensation can be agreed on.
Once there is a consensus of the positioning of compensation relative to the external market, the CPBN team will assist in the development of your paygrade structure and in the development of a policy framework that will support a smooth transition to the new compensation system. An example a best practice pay structure is shown below.
Assistance with Transition Management
At CPBN we make a clear distinction between “Change” and “Transition.”
“Change” is a Point of Arrival: a new institutional arrangement, a new organisation structure with changes in reporting relationships, redesigned process and redesigned roles, the move to a new site, the implementation of ICT enablers to support business processes execution.
On the other hand, Transition is psychological. It is a three-phase process (see Error! Reference source not found. above), that people go through as they internalize and come to terms with the details of the new situation that the change will bring about. All three phases of a transition have risks for the organisation but particularly risky is phase 2, “The Neutral Zone” or the “Wilderness”, this in-between place where things have not quite ended and have not quite begun. This is the place where defections can occur and where team members can lose faith that any of the promised improvements will become a reality.
We believe that getting people through the transition is essential if any “Change” is to work as planned.
The 3 Stages of Transition
Throughout the transformation journey with your organisation the CPBN team will have been focusing on the Change Management Success Factors shown below. At the outset there was a focus on Orientation (clarifying over-arching goals and strategies) and in the assessment place our demonstration that there as a “melting iceberg,” was aimed at building the case for change and creating conviction throughout the organisation that change was needed.
During the transition phase, CPBN will support your organisation with the remaining change success factors (see below), namely:
- Ensuring ability
- Ensuring uniform perception
- Harvesting the promised gains and making results felt, and
- Ensuring that there is a foundation for lasting change.
