Business Strategy

You wouldn't get in a car without knowing where you were headed, right? The same principle applies to managing a company. Without a proper strategic planning process, you are driving blind. Solidifying and documenting your business strategy will create the needed clarity on what your organization intends to do.

Corresponding metrics and smart goals will establish how you plan to achieve those objectives. This forms executional priorities for managers, teams, and individuals, empowering them to focus efforts on initiatives that directly impact the shared key performance indicators (KPIs).

In close collaboration with client stakeholders, we identify the people, process, and technology needed to reach and maintain the targeted business goals. That includes the enablement of risk analysis and contingency planning practices that create a meaningful competitive advantage. The installation of programs for monitoring metrics and establishing governance will help ensure accountability going forward.

Whether you are starting from scratch or have an established strategic planning process, Aspirant can help implement a planning framework that will improve your company's performance.

If a strategy is what your organization is working to achieve, then your operating model is the structure for how you will achieve it. This formal structure of how your organization interacts is a critical component of organizational success. Additionally, for any operating model to be effective, it must be aligned to your organization’s strategic goals.

Working with your organization’s leadership, we will review your current operating model(s), analyze and understand the alignment to your strategic plan, provide recommendations for refinement or redesign, and conduct detailed planning for how to ensure your operating model is deployed, understood, communicated, adjusted and matured in the most effective way.

How do you know if you are being successful? Is that new project having the intended result? Do we need to adjust our strategy, annual plan or daily operation? To answer these and many other questions you need metrics. Whether you call them measures, KPIs, OKR, or something else, we are talking about measuring work, impact, effectiveness, and value. Defining value and how you will measure it is a necessity and must be thoughtfully developed and designed.

We work with you and your teams to define value, establish how to measure it, and set up the structures to ensure data is collected, understood, and utilized in effective decision making. Additionally, we focus on making sure your value and measurement strategy is lightweight, fit for purpose, and support the achievement of your overall strategy.

Whether it is new strategy, improvement project, metrics development, innovation, or daily operations governance, developing the capabilities, rigor and routines to ensure that your teams are being actively managed is a critical component to achieving your goals. Formal governance and accountability systems must be intentionally designed, implemented and matured.

We work with you to establish, define, run, and mature a fit for purpose governance model that is simple, effective, and supports the achievement of your goals

Good governance elements include:

• Data based decision making
• Transformation Oversight Office standup
• Creation, maintenance, and enforcement of policies and procedures
• Standard work development and confirmation
• Innovation and improvement reviews
• Strategic plan review and iteration
• Issue identification, escalation, and proactive problem solving
• Team and Leadership development
• Improvement coaching