Resilience sector insights - Transformation

As it becomes increasingly important for organisations to react dynamically and embrace change, how can businesses prepare for the challenges ahead, and identify upcoming opportunities?

Resilience: a strategic imperative

We see resilience as a strategic imperative to ensure the sustainability of your organisation and drive stakeholder value. Resilience is more than just the ability to absorb and recover from disruptive events. We say resilience is the capacity to remain relevant, competitive and drive value for your stakeholders in these everchanging times.

Organisations operate in a constantly changing environment and need to prepare and plan for a wide range of strategic and operational risks and opportunities and respond quickly to crises. Building resilience is an imperative for all organisations and requires an effective combination of risk management and strategic agility.

We offer a wide breadth of services for a large range of clients across industry sectors. Through conversations across leaders within these services, we’re looking to offer sector insights to demonstrate how strategic resilience plays a major role across all areas of your business.

We spoke with Michelle Osorio, Director of Transformation within the Management Consulting team.

What is Transformation in a nutshell?

It is about future-proofing an organisation to unlock sustainable, profitable growth. We partner with our clients to conduct a forensic diagnostic of business challenges, collaborating on solutioneering to accomplish transformational outcomes.

What are our clients’ short-term (0-12 months) risks and opportunities with Transformation? 

There can be nervousness around investment in technology & systems. Just because there is a technology related challenge within a business, it does not mean that technology is the only enabler - however, technology can be the single, biggest factor to blame. We work with our clients to broaden their horizons when diagnosing the root causes and capturing intrinsic business requirements, recognising the rapid pace of tech change.

For any organisation where technology transformation is not palatable or most likely should not be considered as the ‘Silver Bullet’, then people and process elements should play their deserving parts in the transformation scope - both at the tactical level as well as fundamental re-engineering initiatives.

The opportunity is to highlight business requirements and thus priorities, specify the ‘Addressable Scope’ respectively across technology, people & process. There is always considerable mileage to go after the ‘lower hanging fruits’ through process optimisation or adapting ways of working, prior to segregating the ‘real game changers’ through technology enablers - this also helps organisations to realistically sequence their transformation roadmap.

What are our clients’ medium-term (3-5 years) risks and opportunities with Transformation?

In the medium term, clients should focus on medium-term transformation should serve to underpin organisational strategy and plan together with a ‘horizon-scanning’ exercise.

The last 2 years have proven to be testing for many; sector-specific challenges have been amplified following the cost-of-living crisis, workforce supply challenges, supply chain disruptions, as well as geopolitical tensions. Even without a crystal ball, I would highly recommend Senior Leadership re-prioritise ‘Cost Transformation’ to stamp out ‘wastes & leakages’, and innovatively refresh business processes and policies, with the view to restore market confidence and create further financial headroom to reinvest into building relevant capabilities, streamline operations and strengthen organisational maturity to support growth and diversification over the medium term.

So, ‘Grow resiliently and deliver sustainably’ would be our north star to create value for our clients.

What are the longer-term considerations?

Transformation leaders should always have the end game in mind – what would ‘future perfect’ look like for your organisation, for the aspects that are within and outside your control.

Let’s talk about the organisational backbone - People, it is about having the right capability in the right place, coupled with the organisational ability to attract, develop, and retain, whilst putting in place effective succession planning. As Intelligent Automation & RPA become the norm, organisations should embrace this and support their workforce to move up the value chain.

This also links to another elephant in the room - is the ‘Organisational Culture’ enabling capability development and casting a positive influence on our people? We can introduce our Culture Compass to help evaluate and reset the dial for your organisation, and more intrinsically collaborate with your people to develop a skills matrix to provide clear, practical advice on strengthening the existing workforce and bridging the delta for short to longer-term capability requirements.

How can we help our clients?

We would like to share our ‘Superpower’ here: 

We can deploy an innovation backed transformation approach with a senior-led engagement model, which is underpinned by ‘field leaders’ that have real-world experience to offer value-add, practical thought leadership.

We never commoditise our client’s business challenge; where others may take trigger points to ‘sell’ their methodical, generic solutions, we invest in forensic deep dives to truly engineer a tailored solution, in collaboration with our clients who have been on the journey to lead the Change.

We are 'in it together' with our clients to drive implementation and cash in the benefits enabled by integrated change management to boost adoption.

National Resilience Contact – Dan Breger, Associate Director, Management Consulting

National Transformation Contact – Michelle Osorio, Director, Management Consulting

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