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Program Design & Oversight
Accelerate change. Exceed expectations. Deliver as promised.
Newport Consulting Group has worked over the years in a variety of business transformation programs to define the proper set of requirements needed to achieve benefits and outcomes, as well as to inspect troubled in-flight programs which are in jeopardy of failure. Our firm provides interventions through assessment and restructuring to preserve organization investments. We do this through integrating program structure and governance, with the benefit of enterprise design familiarity based on over 250 person-years of collective strategy, business management, change leadership and project management expertise.
Strategic Change for Business Transformation
Senior executives are often looking for the “secret sauce” that will ensure success of their large-scale business transformation. After all, they’ve budgeted millions of dollars for the initiative, identified a team to drive the effort, and targeted tens of millions, or even hundreds of millions, of dollars in cost savings or revenue enhancements.While there are many variables that dictate how successful a business transformation effort will be, there is a core set of success factors which is highly correlated with successful business transformation outcomes. These factors can be divided into two domains – “hard” and “soft.” The hard factors are the formal structure and process components and the soft factors are the informal behavioral and intangible ones. Newport Consulting Group has demonstrated mastery of both domains during the course of working through dozens of business transformation efforts.
Accelerating End-user Adoption for Systems Implementations
Not surprisingly, IT executives tend to be more at-home with the technical aspects of their system implementation project and tend to be less comfortable with the “people” aspects of the project. As a result, IT project teams naturally spend a disproportionate amount of time focused on technology instead of a stakeholder engagement strategy that will drive end-user adoption.
This point is underscored by the March 2011 Gartner study which found that companies under-invest in organizational change management for their IT implementations. Gartner recommends that project teams allocate 15% of their budget to organizational change management activities. A savvy IT leader will acknowledge this weakness and seek out experienced organizational change experts to embed into their project teams. Principal Jesse Jacoby provides insight on the under-utilization of sound organization change management practices. Read about it here.Organization Agility for
Competitive Advantage
In a recent study, more than 80% of CEOs cited the ability to adapt to change as a source of competitive advantage. These same CEOs cited change management as a priority for their organizations. Many companies are opting to build internal change capabilities to help accelerate the implementation of their strategic initiatives and provide the organizational agility needed to weather these turbulent times.What is your organizational change strategy? If you don’t have a strong one, we can help. We are experts at designing and implementing organizational change capabilities for clients – everything from developing a tailored change methodology to creating change tools and developing customized change management training programs for all levels of the enterprise. Let us partner with you to develop a more agile organization.
Program Design & Oversight
Many programs and portfolio structures of investments are doomed from the start due to inadequate stakeholder funding, political support, or resources assigned to an initiative. These scenarios often lead to dangerous morale depressions in the organization and failure to achieve benefits. Yet, particularly given the resource constraints of the Great Recession and the need to appease stakeholders and investors, these practices have become commonplace.
Getting the return on investment required for a business initiative, whether it’s the integration of a new operating unit or the introduction of new technologies, is essential to capture market share and maintain innovative leadership in a competitive environment. As such we believe that it is imperative to define the right set of program structures necessary to achieve success.
We provide assessments, business case review and development, requirements definitions, and interventions to determine the proper set of structures and resources needed to support those structures to operationalize strategic decisions. We subscribe to the best practices from the Project Management Institute (PMI, www.pmi.org) to help frame initiatives into a portfolio of programs to achieve returns.
Enabling Mobility Strategies
While mobile applications provide a new dimension to the "always on" organization, properly introducing these technologies with the proper executive sponsorship can be tricky business. Read about how one airline carrier introduced an employee based Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) program here.
Business Alignment for Apparel Maker
A $4 billion brand retailer and manufacturer of apparel
and consumer products sought assistance to confirm their
strategy to shift domestic operations overseas. Learn how we recommended a shift in business alignment with an Order to Cash program using SAP. Read about it here.
Global Trade Assessment
A major division of a multi-national corporation faced challenges to implement a global trade solution for customs and compliance management across its organization following an acquisition. Read about it here.
Enterprise-wide Content Strategy
A State government required an enterprise benchmarking
of ECM practices in place across all agencies, including the determination of short, intermediate, and long term content management requirements of those participating agencies and offices. Read about it here.
Merger Value Maximization
Merging two established organizations is not merely the combination of two operations under one management authority. Successful integration combines, replaces, and transforms diverse processes, systems and organizational structures. Done well, the resulting entity will be distinctly different and ideally much better than the original operations – this is the “synergy” that is goal of most mergers.
To realize synergies of combining two or more organizations, its imperative that leaders invest the necessary time and resources in preparing for the integration of the two organizations. In our experience, realizing the goal of a well-designed and smoothly executed merger requires mastery of several organizational challenges, such as theBlack Box Challenge, Challenge of Choice, and Buy-In Challenge (Don’t know what these are? Call us.)
If you are planning a merger or are in the process of a post-merger integration effort and would like an objective perspective, contact us. We would be happy to share our experience, insights, and lessons learned with you.
ph: + 1 (248) 978-2000
fax: + 1 (248) 922-5907
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