Health check
Benefits
- Increased revenues
- Lower costs
- Risks identified
- Quick wins
- Prepared for future changes
Summary
Every organisation can grow, improve its results. When you can't see room for improvement anymore, I can. I bring experience from around the world and can spot short and long term improvements based on new insights. After spending time to investigate the internal workings of your organisation, with minimal intrusion and business disruption, a report will give you a structured view of options, their estimated benefits and costs. The report will be presented and explained, then you can decide which ones to take on and how.
Explanation
A health check's purpose is to create an explicit 'reset button' for any organisation director, providing a low cost method to check whether all the decisions made so far have indeed led to the best results. If it turns out that they have, that will be a great result to share, as celebrating success also infuses new energy in an existing organisation. More likely, there are insights from other organisations in other parts of the world that can shed a new perspective on the current architecture.
Having visited, investigated, and made improvements in many organisations, PL Advice has gathered lots of invaluable knowledge. The most added value that this can provide is its reuse across other organisations. See it as 'cross pollination'.
Method
The first investigation is desktop research from the documentation and information you can provide about the following;
- Mission, vision, strategy
- Organisation chart
- Financial plan
- IT infrastructure documentation
- Set of policies
- Set of contracts
- Set of business process descriptions
- Enterprise architecture documentation
- Risk framework
- Master information management model
- Product list
- Market and client overview
This provides an opportunity to define how mature and how structured the organisation is. It allows investigation in possilibities for providing structure where this would enhance the organisation's results. It is also possible to find signs of bureaucracy, opportunities for simplifying the organisation, realising cost reduction and increased speed in operations.
The next step is a site visit, laying eyes on the organisation and its internal functioning. This might provide insight in the match between what's on paper and what happens in reality. A company culture shows only through the behaviour and actions of the people. During a site visit, interviews will be needed, which means that people will need to spend some time away from their work. This requires careful planning and commitment from the organisation.
Now, there is some time for the results to be transformed in a report with supporting documentation. There will be some quiet time until the report is completed. Possibly, some additional questions will be asked in order to complete the report.
When completed, the report with all its findings will be presented with the decision makers present. An overview is shown of the areas in which opportunities for improvement fere found, and they are explained in detail. Following this presentation, questions can be asked to get a better understanding of what this means to the current organisation and what the future holds in store.
You then decide how to continue, whether to continue with PL Advice at all in implementing these improvements. Some possible ways to continue
- For one or more of the options, you hire me as project manager to implement them. Alternatively, you implement them yourself, or with another company.
- For one or more of the options, an external solution is needed, like a supporting software system, and I can help in the selection of the right vendor.
- For one or more of the options, you want a knowledge transfer. You can hire me for a training or workshop so that after the knowledge transfer the people in the organisation can take the next step.
How to start
Please contact me via the contact form. I will first visit for a presentation and discussion of the product and approach as explained here. Then you can decide whether to continue on this approach.