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Strategic
review
Have you got clearly defined business goals for the next
3 to 5 years that all your staff
understand and have bought in to? Have you got clear customer targets
for the future development of your business? How will your organisation
respond to the changing world you operate within?
Hitherwood Consulting can help you understand and deal with the
challenges of succeeding in today's business
and organisational environment. Our business support can help you:
- understand the impact of the changing world around
your organisation by reviewing large scales trends that
will affect the whole UK economy, or your region or industry
- work out where your organisation fits amongst your
competitors, and what new forms of competition may be just
around the corner
- understand what specific resources and capabilities
set your organisation apart from the competition
- help you see how the growth of your organisation can
present its own challenges, and work out how these may be overcome.
We do this by working in partnership with your
organisation's senior managers, and also with groups of staff, to
challenge accepted views, to dream up innovative solutions and then to
work out the practicalities of making a change.
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Process
mapping
All organisations can make rapid improvements to their
bottom line by streamlining their business processes.
All too often, processes are not re-examined because "that is the way
it has always been done". What was OK in the past may not be OK now,
and it will be costing your organisation money, in wasted resources,
unneccessary overheads, or reduced competitiveness. Hitherwood
Consulting can help you by providing an independent review of your
internal processes and systems - asking the awkward questions and
suggesting improvements.
We do this by working with you staff to understand exactly what they do
and why. Often the suggested improvements come directly from staff -
it's just that they might not have been asked before, and they might
not understand that there is something in it for them too.
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Supply
chain design
The pattern of today's business is that more and more
operations are delivered by skilled specialist organisations that you
manage and co-ordinate as your supply chain.
Competition today is not so much between individual firms, but between
their whole supply chains!
For this reason, it is vital that you have the best supply chain that
you can.
We can help you identify which of your existing supply relationships
are most important to your business, and help you and those key
suppliers work in partnership to deliver a better service
to your clients, which in turn gives more certainty of future work to
you and your suppliers.
We do this by guiding you through a series of workshops, to define how
you and your supply chain can work together for your own and each
others' benefit. Often you will want to develop some form of Charter
and Guidelines, and we can help you write these in a constructive
way that keeps everyone engaged.
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Whole
life costing
Whole life costing is an increasingly important skill
for all those involved in specifying and delivering projects. This
includes being able to calculate the whole life cost for a scheme and
also being able to understand and interpret the whole life costs
generated by other people.
If you are involved in public sector projects, then whole life costing
is a key part of achieving financial sign-off, to prove that best
economic value is being delivered.
Hitherwood Consulting delivers training courses in whole life costing,
covering both the theory of the approach and the practicalities of
carrying out and understanding the calculations.
These courses are delivered via BSRIA
and are offered as either open courses where mixed groups from
different organisations learn together, or as in-house courses
delivered just for your organisation. If you have 10 or more people who
need to learn about whole life costing, then the in-house option is
usually more cost effective. There is also the opportunity to tailor
the course to your precise needs.
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Staff retention
and recruitment
"People are our most important asset" - many
organisations
use these words but do YOU really mean them? Would your staff agree
with you?
Recruiting and retaining staff is often quoted as the most challenging
problem for a growing business today. We can't create new recruits out
of thin air, but we can help your organisation be more attractive to
existing and potential staff. Examples of strategies we can help you
put in place are:
- Greater transparency between business goals and
individual targets
- Review systems that measure personal behaviours as
well as technical skills
- Reward systems that are seen as fair by all staff.
Problems with recruitment and retention often boil down
to
issues of communication, management style or leadership, where the ball
is firmly in the court of senior managers. When they adapt their
behaviour, the problems are either solved or are much easier to solve.
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Facilitation
How many times have you been involved in discussions
that
have gone round and round in circles, or off at tangents, or decended
into chaos? At best, time is wasted. At worst, participants fall out
with each other and progress comes to a shuddering halt.
Facilitation is about helping a group of people work their way through
a problem. It may be about understanding each other's points of view,
or reaching an agreed solution, or understanding the scale and
complexity of a much larger issue. In all these cases, the facilitator
is there to look after the process, to make sure the group makes
effective
use of time, to record the conclusions, so that
the participants can concentrate on the subject matter.
The vital aspect of our facilitation is that we encourage groups to
develop their own solutions. In this way, the results will be more
easily
accepted and put into practice. The discussion has a real outcome,
rather
than just being a pleasant conversation.
Facilitation works with staff from a single organisation, with people
from different departments, and with people from a range of
organisations.
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Performance
measurement
No business can afford to stand still. But how do you,
as a senior manager,
decide where to concentrate your organisation's resources when it comes
to improving the effectiveness and efficiency of your business?
The key is to understand what makes your stakeholders satisfied with
the way your organisation performs and how these outcomes are linked
to the strategies and
procedures the organisation adopts. Focus on the right inputs and
you will get improved outputs. Focus on the wrong inputs and you
will be wasting time and money, or may even make things worse. Of
course,
the stakeholders in your organisation are not just your customers, but
also
include staff, suppliers, shareholders, regulators. Their relative
importance
will depend on the nature of your business!
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To talk to us about your specific needs and to arrange a
no-obligation meeting, call David Churcher on
020 8670 5950
or 07900 254090, or email david.churcher@hitherwood.co.uk.
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