Successful Business

Applying a test marketing approach to launching a consulting practice

Challenge: New regulatory frameworks were appearing to threaten long-standing business practices and revenue assumptions for industries, establishing ambiguous executive accountability expectations enforceable with extreme prejudice under the law. Affected firms included all publicly held firms, as well as those industries using customer contact, health and financial information.

Solution: Developed scenario based working prototypes of web-based applications envisioning ‘a day in the life’ for target audiences to address specific industry use cases.

Results: It became routine to launch new practices leveraging purpose-built prototypes and conceptual architectures that placed envisioned ‘day’s in the life’ into enterprise context, garnering $40M + per year for the next four years.

Developing a company-wide operational model for program management

Challenge: The firm had grown quickly and was adopting program management but was not enjoying the benefits leadership expected.

Solution: Designed a Program Management Office (PMO), including roles, processes, procedures, initial management artifacts to standardize operations

Results: Program rationalization provided visibility into the volume, complexity and inter-dependencies of work streams across the firm, informing how and when to invest in new capabilities.

Collaborating through master data management

Challenge: Operating margins, customer satisfaction and long-term viability were at risk from pervasively inconsistent and inefficient selling, booking, supporting and billing capabilities.

Solution: Stood up a master data hub, and groomed a cross-functional data stewardship team to establish and protect a trustworthy system of record of core data assets and deliver them routinely into the financial and operational systems where they are needed.

Results: System of record data for products, orders and customers gradually gained the trust of its intended consumers, replacing non-certified sources, improving the quality of operational data, ease of access and overall organizational effectiveness.

Strategic program consolidation

Challenge: A well-funded joint venture was investing heavily and quickly to capitalize on the unfolding market opportunities. Its leadership had been engaging several teams from both the owning companies and third-parties to prepare the entity for launch at scale. These work streams worked independently of each other, unintentionally materializing previously undeclared implementation risk of mission and resource overlap as well as gaps in coverage.

Solution: Coalesced these multiple work steams into a cohesive integrated program structure, providing consolidated visibility of resources, milestones and risk across initiatives. Positioned the firm to manage its portfolio of work centrally.

Results: The refactored program delivered to commitments, regaining leverage and efficiencies of scale, while also improving the trust-worthiness of program information and increasing stakeholder confidence in the strategy, capability and leadership of the joint venture.