Organisation Design

Optimising your organisation can be a highly effective way to increase effectiveness and reduce cost, shift emphasis to deliver new value, mitigate competitive pressures, and empower your workforce. But it needs to be done well. Too often organisational design just tries overcome inefficiencies by redesigning an organisational in the least controversial way. Rarely do the final designs get tested against the initial aims. Worst still, few make it off the page leaving an organisation wondering what all the disruption was for in the first place.

At Verostrat we understand that redesigning an organisation on a slide is a world away from landing meaningful change that actually improves an organisation’s effectiveness. We focus on quick wins and actually delivering them. In our experience, this is the best way to mobilize your organisation and convince them of the need to change. It’s hard to argue with improvements you can actually touch and feel. This approach also means we can test and adapt, work out what will actually work for you, stop when you’ve got what you need or do more where opportunities emerge.

We aim to leave you with an improved organisation not just a transformation plan.

Embedding Innovation

Every organisation needs to be innovative, right? Well maybe not. Most services and product development simply comes from incremental improvement. Having an organisation that is geared to continuous improvement may be the most effective way for you to retain or take a competitive advantage.

However, when it is required successful innovation requires organisational commitment and resource, whether that be capital or people. So before committing to that, organisations first need to be clear on how innovation will support and drive your aims. This requires an honest look at return on investment. There are no-end of soft furnished innovation hubs and labs that haven’t generated boardroom excitment but never moved the needle.

Verostrat have helped organisations leverage innovation to delivery meaningful outcomes and we can help you decide if it’s the right approach for you. This will include how best to use innovation within your environment. Too often innovation is simply seen as a lab to deliver novel approaches and tech. That may be right for you, in which case we can help you design and deliver an effective innovation capability. But what most organisations miss is how to use innovation to deliver broader organisational change. Innovation can deliver the financial headroom you need to pivot your business, it can accelerate your transformation and it can remove the need to do certain things.

We will help you get beyond the hype, decide whether innovation is the right goal and how it can best support your aims. At that point, Verostrat can use our experience of building innovation centres and innovation-accelerate transformation to support your ambitions.

Programme Delivery

Programmes don’t ever run as planned and relying on Plan B is rarely an option for an organisation who needs to change in a specific direction.

There are numerous reasons why programmes unravel. The most common is over-optimism during the planning phase. But the other common reason is because of the reducing effectiveness of the programme management team. In particular, this can lead to lack of pace and focus on the defined outcomes. In-house programme management is a double edged sword. The team have the benefit of understanding your organisation and your business, which often brings high levels of early enthusiasm and progress. But this advantage diminishes for a number of reasons. Internal PMOs are more prone to the pull of organisational factors such as internal politics or distaction by other emerging priorities. Typically they become less focussed on their principle task of delivering the programme. And the programme can quickly become a business-as-usual process, losing its emphasis on the required benefits and, in turn, the support of the organisation.

Programme delivery needs a relentless focus on delivering the milestones in order to stay on schedule. More importantly, programme delivery needs to be singularly honed on meeting the programme outcomes and benefits.

Verostrat has wide experience of delivering and rescuing programmes. This includes short-sharp interventions to managing large scale initiatives. Importantly, we aim to shore-up, support, re-invigorate your existing programme management, not replace it. Long-term success is not just about injecting high-energy support but by putting a programme back on the right footing. A key element of that is an honest assessment of the delivery plan and reporting mechanisms that help your leadership monitor progress going forward.

Decision Support

There have been numerous studies that show how often people are wrong when they are convinced they are right. Most decision-making is tainted by some degree of optimism bias. And this is particularly true in commercial organisations who typically invest significant effort into decision-making. So why does it so often not workout as anticipated?

Rigorous decision-making is hard. Not because the processes are particularly tricky but because it often runs counter to how individuals and groups typically make decisions. Poor decision-making can often be traced back to two reinforcing factors. People and organisations might not recognise deficits in their knowledge and they rarely consider that the information they rely on is unreliable. These can be tough realisations for organisations who feel they know their business and customers inside-out. Counterintuitively, it can be this familiarity and experience that can have a detrimental impact on decision-making if not managed correctly.

We’ve helped a number of organisations approach critical decision-making in more objective ways. This has ranged from ‘Red Teaming’ plans to helping them develop robust and structured templates to balance investment decisions. Often the biggest challenge we see is that organisations simply don’t have the right information to support their key decisions.

Verostrat doesn’t believe in just telling you that you right or wrong. We focus on approaches and models that are flexible so they support you now and in the future. The pace of change means that you need a dynamic way to continually re-assess and adapt your plans. So you need an approach that supports that in the future as well as today.

Strategic Growth

These are particularly challenging times! Maybe it’s more accurate to say it always challenging in the modern era. Competition or customer expectation has always demanded organisations increase their services while driving down cost. At the same time protecting margins in the commercial sector or delivering more from constrained budgets in the public sector.

Most established companies and organisations are as entrepreneurial as they feel they need to. There is good reason for that. Entrepreneurial, like ‘innovation’, is a loaded term. Both carry the suggestion of a dynamism that all companies and organisations should aspire to, right? But that’s not the reality for many established organisations and nor should it be. More often you need to be focused on improving output and improving your customers’ experience while running a sustainable business. This is why most change is incremental.

But there are times when you need to kick-start something new. Competitive pressure, changing customer needs, new technology, stakeholder requirements and any number of other factors. And for today’s lean organisations it is hard to pivot to new services or develop new markets. Having identified new opportunities, how do you get after it? This is where Verostrat can help.

We have experience in building new business and services for existing companies and organisations. Whether that be helping you aligning your existing capabilities to vision, opening up new sectors, business development, or closing deals through to initial project delivery. To ensure we are sector relevant, we are able to leverage our wide associate network to ensure we get the latest thinking, market advocacy, business development, sales team and PMO. Our experience covers sprints to get organisations moving all the way through to designing and delivering multi-year sales pipelines.