Change Capability
Conventional thinking separates the development of the individual from the development of the organisation. Practical experience suggests that they are inextricably linked. We agree.
The Playbook is a 40-hour course, delivered over 10 months (yep, our fractional model) that evolves the capability of your people, your teams and your delivery organisation in a way that they can apply practically to the live environment. It delivers stronger risk management, more executable planning, more effective governance, and improvement in all areas of programme delivery, all designed, implemented and operated by your own teams, with support and a guiding hand from experienced professionals who have seen what works and what doesn’t in the real world. The course delivers a range of practical techniques, tools and templates that your team can apply on live projects for immediate benefit and incremental improvement at a pace the organisation can easily absorb.
Advisory
Engaging an external view is not an admission of failure, it’s an investment in success.
Some failures are unavoidable but it can only make sense to tap into expertise and experience to ensure that the avoidable becomes ‘avoided.’ So often, organisations are dissuaded from engaging expertise for two reasons: The first is it’s expensive, and the second is that the land-and-expand’ agenda of the consulting industry can hazard the control of the programme, and ultimately the organisation’s own interests. So we’ve solved those problems: Our advisory services are delivered on a fractional basis, keeping the outlay low (about the same outlay as a junior contract project manager) and therefore sustainable. And our terms of engagement do not allow us to expand our advisory role or intrude into actual delivery. So our clients get the expertise and the experience without a big bill or a battle of wills.
Assurance
Getting line-of-sight from the Boardroom to the engine-room of a programme is one of the biggest practical challenges in corporate governance.
The delivery of change within organisations ranges from opaque to surprising for many boards. Our role is to engage with the Board via a structured process to provide assurance that all of the key elements of a programme are in place and being executed proficiently on an ongoing basis. As with our other services, assurance is delivered via a fractional model which ensures low outlay and therefore sustainability.
How We Deliver: Fractionally.
‘Always on’ was a great strapline for broadband when it was launched, but in the 21st Century, there is no need for conventional consulting models that are geared more towards the provider’s desire for high utilisation of staff than the client’s actual needs. So we don’t camp out on your doorstep. Instead we deliver on a little-and-often basis, for four key reasons:
1. It’s more effective.
External services bring value, but they typically require internal resources to deliver to. The trick to achieving that successfully is balance: Insufficient engagement will short the client organisation on the benefits, but too much will distract the organisation from its goal. So we keep it fractional. It varies by service, but typically our clients never need more than 25% of our time if they are ever to put our inputs into action, so we agree a utilisation and keep to it.
2. It’s more sustainable.
If you have an external advisor, continuity is important, but not at the expense of the budget becoming a hostage. Consulting can only be effective if the outlay is proportionate to the budget of the programme that is being supported, so that the client can be supported throughout the life of a programme. Conventional consulting rates don’t generally lend themselves to continuity, which tends to result in a series of abrupt, reactive engagements. Fractional is different: It means we can be there to the finish line and the only place our presence won’t be felt is in the programme budget.
3. It supports the in-house team.
One of the unpleasant side-effects of land-and-expand is the way it can marginalise the in-house team. Conventional consulting models rely on both high utilisation and large teams to deliver profit, and often the first casualty of that model is your own people, who find themselves on the sidelines of your organisations biggest and most exciting initiatives. Not only is that bad news for the individual: It also sets up the organisation as a hostage to that consultancy model and prevents the organisation from developing its own delivery muscle. Fractional works differently. There is literally no way to execute except via the in-house team, so collaboration is not just guaranteed, it’s pivotal to the success of the engagement, and with that collaboration comes real, on the job transfer of skills and knowledge; the transfer that conventional consultancy often promises but seldom delivers.
4. It makes Oxford8 more effective too.
The fractional model means that we engage with a greater range and number of clients simultaneously than conventional consultancies. So our own people evolve at a much faster rate and have a greater breadth of experience to draw on that any conventional consultancy. And we can then pass that benefit onto our clients.
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Articles
Help! Can Anyone Fly a Plane? – LinkedIn
What started life as a joke from the movie ‘Airplane!’ created some great insights into management behaviours in a crisis.
For those who’ve never seen the aviation comedy classic ‘Airplane!’, there’s a scene where, faced with improbably incapacitated pilots at 40,000 feet, the flight attendant keys the microphone and ‘gentilely’ asks the passengers if any of them can fly a plane. Cue comedic panic…
A mate of mine used to be a simulator instructor on the Airbus A320 – the holiday wagon that carts you off on your annual pilgrimage to Berlin/Nice/Barcelona (delete as appropriate). When he wasn’t training real pilots in the simulator, he used to do corporate days so that execs could experience what it was like to fly an airliner. Nothing too dramatic; just a bit of stick, rudder and throttles, so that the execs could awe their children with tales of airborne derring-do over supper.
Continue reading on LinkedIn