Leading Solutions consulting turnaround and realignment – Knowing what must be improved - Process

I recently came across this quote and it struck a chord; very deep.

Forget the mistake, remember the lesson. Fire your process, not your person!

I used #Data and #Analytics first to get a view of past performance. Practise #Digital to Preach. Eat your own dogfood basically. Out of the many #insights, #benchmarking #bigdata with some #predictiveanalytics proved immediately beneficial. This was necessary since, as a new incoming leader, I had to demonstrate early #success to #influence #outcomes on ongoing pursuits with #coaching and #mentoring or even direct intervention to lead by example. I will cover this thread later. Continuing from my previous article, I chose to understand the #processes and #governance next. Now, we all know the story of the nine blind men and each trying to perceive it differently. I had to avoid falling into that trap. As a functional #leader also engaged in #Management #Consulting, I could also easily have a jaundiced eye and become biased.

#Sales #Solutioning and #Enablement is glue which facilitates #Business #Development and #Advisors in early sales stage with #Solution #Consulting capability. It is the function which brings together all elements of the organization from #Sales through to #Practices, #Solutions, #Service #delivery and a few more in later sales stages. It was vital therefore to know how seamless were the processes and interfaces to enable timely submission of deliverables to the customer. Processes are important.

There are many ways of getting from A to B. Not many years ago, my family chose to move away from London so that we live closer to an airport that would help my business travels. We also wanted to live in a place blessed with a blasphemy of good schools. We could have bought a house and moved in. But, what if, the children wanted to go back to London. We therefore chose to rent in, try out for a year and then choose we buy or go back to London. That would be two moves but it is also about fail fast and take corrective action.

At work, similarly, I had to realise the Vision of #change and #transformation with the least business disruption and a path to claw back. Given the complexity of working for a large and highly #matrixed #organization, there were obviously many processes and sub-processes, methodologies and governance at each and every stage. The key was to choose to understand the intricacies of the processes to be improved.

- At the outset, what were the formal and informal processes? What were the formal and informal governance? How many reviews of what, when and how?

- How many central, regional, industry processes? How many sales processes, #strategy processes, #enablement processes, solutioning processes, #delivery processes, costing & pricing finance processes, proposal excellence processes, HR processes, partner engagement and what have you? How many are redundant & repetitive?

- What were the core impediments or enablers to agility and the core purpose of (a) having customer engagement(s) for Mutual value discussion, (b) to submission of a best in class solution and proposal that fulfils customer requirements, (c) arriving at economical costs and price aligned to appropriate terms and conditions? Eventually, the focus is to #WIN

- How many internal #shaping and #strategy sessions within and between the streams? How many could be streamlined or rationalized in favour of more effective collaboration and transparency?

- What were the #Pursuit #portfolio and #Resource management processes? What were the #Demand forecasting processes and what was the alignment from long-term to near-term supply fulfilment of managing pursuits?

- Many more…

There was information available either in the form of online workflow tools or in the form of offline spreadsheets or slides or documents. The patterns started to unravel.

Remember, the moment you accept total responsibility for everything in your life is the moment you claim the power to change anything in your life. – Hal Elrod

To be continued….

About the Author

The author had first published the article on #LinkedIn on June 15, 2017

Jagadish is a Strategic Board adviser, senior Executive leader with specialisation in reimagining business models; who has been successful at building and/or turnaround Practice advisory, Presales, Sales enablement, Solution consulting capabilities for: - Applications & Enterprise applications- Modernising and Transformation to a secure hybrid Cloud- Service Integration and Management in a multi-cloud environment- Digital workplace solutions- Digital transformation using IoT, IIoT, Big Data, Analytics, Artificial Intelligence, Drones and Robots- IT Infrastructure services More recently, Jagadish has influenced re-imagining a digitally enabled business model for a leading enterprise#IoT, #IIoT, #Bigdata, #Analytics, #artificialintelligence, #drones, #robots, #RPA, #cloud, #hybridcloud, #sales, #presales, #salesenablement, #strategy, #managementconsulting, #boardadvisor, #nonexecutivedirector, #applications, #digitaltransformation, #mixedreality, #integration, #collaboration, #API, #microservices, #marketplace, #solutionconsulting, #servicemanagement, #governance, #riskmanagement, #cybersecurity, #saas, #CRM, #ERP, #customerexperience, #customersuccess