Case Studies
Designing a Transformation Programme for an Engineering Company
This medium sized engineering company were faced with the need to radically transform the way they operated in order to meet demands from their most important clients for significantly increased levels of service. We designed a transformation programme using the Mosaic Transformation methodology that broke down a series of complex interlocking changes into manageable chunks, which could be tackled in a logical sequence with available resources. Each stage of the change process was designed to prepare the ground for the next stage of the programme.
Designing a Transformation Programme for a Public Sector Organisation
This large Public Sector provider needed to institute a programme to change the way it managed its operations. Structural change was politically unacceptable, so a series of changes to working practices and interdepartmental relationships was needed to overcome the problem of process breakdowns between departments. Fractal supported the design of an incremental change process that allowed management resource to be concentrated on achieving packages of change. High levels of staff involvement ensured that this change was driven by the staff affected, minimising the traditional problems of resistance.
Designing a Transformation Programme for a Manufacturing Company
This manufacturing company was struggling to cope with demand and was unable to expand due to shortages of skilled labour. Fractal recommended changes to the operational structure with a switch from functional departments to manufacturing cells. We helped to design a change process that integrated organisational change and the formation of the cell teams with major equipment changes. The organisational change was incremental and progressively reduced the burden on the hard pressed front line managers, as well as dramatically improving efficiency, turnover and delivery performance.
Managing a Portfolio of Transformation Projects
A large charity had a very unstructured approach to the selection and initiation of transformation programmes. Each was looked at individually, without reference to the impact on the wider organisation and the consequence was an organisation with change going on simultaneously in all of its core operations and, unsurprisingly, struggling to provide the management capacity to oversee and direct this volume and spread of change. Fractal provided expertise to help the charity design a portfolio process and prioritisation criteria to bring strategic alignment to their portfolio of transformational change.
Sequencing transformation through time
A global pharmaceutical company had a massive portfolio of IT-enabled change. This included a cyclic refresh and upgrade of underpinning infrastructure, and demand for new applications and application enhancements. In total, the cost of requirements exceeded available budget. Our consultant designed a portfolio process and prioritisation criteria which enabled the competing demands from different functions to be assessed for business impact, and ensured that necessary investment in infrastructure didn’t get squeezed out. This required phasing capital and revenue investment over several years, with careful definition of the dependencies between investments, and ensuring an even pipeline of benefits delivery to the organisation, aligned to business priorities.
Benefits of Partnership for Patient Health
An NHS trust had an ambitious agenda to integrate patient care, adult social care and lifestyle counselling for patients with long term medical needs in a deprived inner city area. It was, of course, critical to validate that the benefits to the patient of a single coordinated service at the point of use was worth the investment to deliver it. It was also important to ensure that the distribution of costs and the subsequent delivery of benefits across the different service providers was understood by all before the transformation programme took place. Our consultant took the stakeholders through a thorough benefits definition approach, to build shared clarity on the outcomes of the programme, and to reach agreement from all the service providers on the nature and timing of their contribution to the new integrated service for patients.
Grounding Benefits Definition in reality
In a large biopharmaceutical company, many high cost transformation programmes were initiated with an insubstantial business case, where the expected benefits were written as aspirations rather than demonstrable outcome from change. Fractal brought its benefits management methodology through a blend of training and programme consultancy to ensure that the programmes each had a validated set of benefits statements and a clear model of change to deliver them.
Real-Time Performance Management in an International Chemicals Company
The performance measurement system for this company was designed to operate in real-time, and to filter out ‘noise’ to help managers to focus on the real issues behind the figures. The measurement in real time allowed managers to react more quickly than traditional retrospective systems. The performance management system linked the efficiency of processes and the effectiveness of the process management at both operational and strategic levels. This direct linkage of performance measures to strategic objectives also gave the flexibility to easily change performance measures as objectives changed without requiring a complete re-arrangement of the performance management system.
Bringing a new innovation to market in the ICT market
This project involved the design, development and deployment of a strategy to bring a new and complex innovation to market. The development process involved all major stakeholders to ensure that the resultant strategy was appropriate and consistent with all of their needs. The process took into account technology and market maturity to ensure that the developed value proposition was synchronised with the emerging market. A target segment was identified and a range of services were developed to enable the company to address a mission critical issue within the chosen segment.
Developing Innovation Options in a Medium Sized IT Company
This IT service provider needed to develop new innovation opportunities quickly. Fractal was asked to run an innovation workshop to surface and test ideas. The management team developed and did first screen testing on over 20 innovation ideas, evaluating each against a mixed set of criteria including market factors, technical feasibility, and suitability of business models. From these, enough passed the screening criteria to provide enough innovation targets for the next 18 months.
