Strategy and Operating Model development

Business people in the modern office
Professional services company cutting the right costs

Situation

  • Our client had been growing for a number of years to become one of the leading professional services players in the global market
  • It had also become harder for the organization to understand ‘who’ their customers really were and if the products and services they had on offer would meet their current or future customer needs
  • As a part of the development of its five-year corporate strategy, rebalancing operating costs was identified as a clear enabler to allow the business to invest in growth, what solutions were in demand by different segments, and how their current customer behaviors could inform future customer acquisition
  • The client recognized the potential for operational excellence and cost cutting to be a differentiator required to drive organic growth in a highly competitive market

Challenge

  • Organization was struggling with strategic priorities, organizational resets, and fining new ways of operating although all the options were on the table for some time as the company was trying to balance cost-cutting with reinvestments for growth
  • Due to internal dynamics Agile Dynamics had to carefully introduce three actions that would help cut the right costs in the right ways and help client’s business emerge fighting fit from this crisis

Action

  • We helped the client company with focusing on the core capabilities that differentiate them in the market in a smart way to redirect costs to the right growth drivers by deploying Business Architecture artifacts such as business capabilities mapping, value streams and services portfolio
  • Based on our assessments and broad adoption among the key stakeholders, we developed a combination of “no-regrets moves” (low-risk decisions) and “strategic bets” that were high-reward in the scenarios we were betting on
  • Our enterprise wide change management program brought the people with client’s leadership into the new way of operating
  • We were successful in isolating and rewarding the few behaviors that allowed critical teams to solve problems quickly, then built them into the new way of operating and continued promoting them

Result

  • Program delivery provided clear cut insight into how coherent company’s strategy is and how well it is translated into the everyday
  • By determining company type (the archetype), highlighting the core of the strategic challenge’s, organization was able to articulate key messages top down
  • By being able to drill down into specific regions and business units to develop action plans this ultimately led to massive improvements ~100M++) in OPEX

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