Category Archives: Planning

Helping A Great Team Think & Act Differently

Total Clothing wanted to involve people from right across the team to streamline their processes, to prepare in advance for another year of major growth. They asked Critical Action to help with building vision, identifying changes and putting a plan into action.

“We worked with many of our team, led by Keith, to identify bottlenecks in our processes and by voting on the most urgent issues, gave everyone a sense of inclusion and buy-in.

It has brought the team so much closer in terms of working towards common goals and also in the way they communicate with each other on an ongoing basis.

We are really thinking differently as a team about the way we operate and this is translating into actions and profitability.

Keith’s no nonsense, practical way of facilitating, managing and ensuring that tasks were completed by all has really helped us overcome some challenging issues and we are moving forward with some exciting times ahead.”

Jan Richardson
Managing Director, Total Clothing Ltd

https://www.totalclothing.co.uk

Role Based Access – CIO White Paper

We’ve been doing a fair bit of work recently around roles and role-based access.

These projects have been around things like Active Directory, new ERP/CRM systems implementations, changes to responsibilities and working processes, and data migrations.

If this sounds like something you’re about to embark upon, and you’d like some assistance with the analysis and logical design, to feed into your technical design, you might find our short role-based permission white-paper gives you some food for thought.

Download the paper here.

Over a few pages, we share a summary of our thinking, observations and ideas for why role-based access is good, what sort of questions to ask, and how to map roles to groups to permissions.

We’d be delighted to talk you through our approach in more detail if you’d like to contact us.

Value: Why, How, What and Beyond

We’ve been working through Value Propositions this week; a very useful exercise that looks trivial until you try it and really challenge one another as to “so what does that actually mean…?”.

These work best in a group situation, but can be done on your own if you are willing to challenge your thinking and iterate.

You’ll need a whiteboard or a load of Post-Its…

There are several common approaches to value propositions, here are some of our favourites:

Start With Why

Simon Sinek’s “Start With Why?” on youtube.

The principle is that products that really matter to people start with “why” they exist, and “why” we as a business do what we do. The video is well worth watching, and explains more about starting with “why”, moving through “how” and finishing with “what” – the product and features.

Jobs To Be Done

The Innovators Toolkit. Again, the full article is worth reading. What Human need are you delivering against? Think of your (short) proposition in three parts:

Action verb – Object – Context

For example:

Create – a company strategy – in small chunks in your spare time

Value Positioning Statement

In his seminal book Crossing The Chasm Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers, Geoffrey Moore describes the Value Positioning Statement, the main parts of which are:

For <customers>
With <need/problem/dissatisfaction>
Our Product is <product, category>
Provides <benefits>.
Unlike <competitor categories>
We do <differentiators>.

Hope you find these useful in communicating the value of what it is you are doing.

V2A – Make Vision Happen

We’re please to announce that our new Vision2Action programme (V2A) is now available!

It’s a fast-tracked, concentrated shot of our customers’ favourite tools and processes. It’s designed to give busy business owners and directors a structure for turning their vision into a strategy with defined objectives, plans for delivering change, and the time and support to keep the momentum up.

The emphasis is on working with you to make the most of your time and knowledge, so we can create for you “actionable documents “- in other words, real documents, with content, decisions, guidance and information; which you can share with your people, refer back to yourself, or use with external suppliers.

Each fixed-price programme includes an initial, intensive set of activities to get things moving, and then quarterly review meetings, plus use of our online goal-tracking platform.

Learn more!

Bespoke versions of the programme are available for larger businesses, organisations or departments – please contact us for more information.

A Day at the RACIs

One of the big challenges of delivering a project efficiently and effectively, is to get the right people involved at the right time, doing the right things, without turning it into death by committee.

RACI matrices help to manage this. They’ve come up a lot in conversations we’ve had recently, so I thought a few words on them might be of interest.

RACI is an acronym for Responsible, Accountable, Communicate, Inform.

List major parts of your project in one column, headed “Areas” or similar – and add four further columns for the four RACI headings.

Consider which names to write in each “cell” – the columns for each row:

Responsible: who will actually do the work which delivers the objective of this area? Can be one or more names
Accountable: which one person puts their name to this area of the project, signs it off, and ultimately is answerable for it?
Consult: with whom will you have 2-way dialogue to get the best delivery of this area – executive stakeholders, subject matter experts, and so on – who helps define things or cover gaps in knowledge for example? Can be one or more names.
Inform: Who needs to be kept abreast of project progress, issues, outcomes and dependencies (like the need for staff training, process change, systems updates, and so on)? Most likely many names, but could be just one.

Once you have defined and agreed the RACI list, make sure people are aware of it, and understand how they fit into it, particularly around Responsible/Accountable (“one name on the ball”).

We sometimes find people in the “Inform” list feel they should be in the “consult” list. If this conversation comes up, we tend to ask what unique knowledge the person brings to need the 2-way conversation, and also seek to get a firm commitment of time they will devote to the Consult work – no commitment = no consulting, in short. That’s not to say that “Informers” can’t contribute to things like initial requirements gathering if that makes sense.

You can also create a RACI matrix with the areas in the left-most column, then people’s names as column headers, with the RACI letters in the “cells” as required – try both formats and see what works best for you. The latter is the more common layout.

GoalStormer – Storm Your Goals!

We’re pleased to announce a new User Interface for GoalStormer, our goal achievement web-app and online community for individuals and businesses.

The new look gives you more of a “dashboard” on PCs and larger tablets, whilst slimming down and giving a simpler look when viewed on smaller tablets and phones.

We hope you like the new look and feel!

Standard GoalStormer accounts are free, and we offer a range of paid-for accounts to meet your needs, plus consultancy services for businesses. Please contact us if you would like more information on using GoalStormer for your business; either with your customers or staff.

In praise of volumetric models

I’ve just been building a volumetric model for a large volume consumer-market website. We wanted to make sure that we sized the initial launch infrstructure correctly, and had an understanding of the cost of growth (of both transactions and data volume).

It’s been a doubly useful exercise – as well as giving us the figures we needed, it has also highlighted an unexpected consequence of (an otherwise very sensible) archiving policy decision. This has allowed us to tweak a policy and create a new approach to one aspect of marketing, saving thousands of pounds per year.

Certainly good anecdotal evidence to support the old programmers adage that “it’s cheaper to fix it on paper…”!

Planning Improvements – for startups?

In my last blog post, I outlined three key stages we use to help businesses improve, and I covered the first area (Commercial Imperative – the “why do it?”):

This time around, we’ll look at “Planning Improvements” – how to change the way your people do what they do, and how to give them better tools. These are the old classics of “people, process and technology”.

Commercial Imperative – what’s the case for doing it – the “why”
Planning Improvements – the what, where, how of action/change
Taking Action – the who and when to make change happen

Hold on. You’ve only just started – how can you improve!?

Well, we believe you can, and should, make improvements every day. Continue reading →

Technologies Supporting Business Continuity

Office365 and Windows Server 2008R2 Business Continuity is a broad church, meaning different things to different businesses. It’s also very much a people thing; after all, it exists to keep people in jobs, delivering to customers, whatever happens.

That said, we have recently been involved in designing and deploying a fair few technology implementation projects within our process and systems work.

What is clear is that over the past year, and probably in the forthcoming year, there are a number of technologies which have come of age, or are due to have some significant upgrades that should transform them. Continue reading →

Unbreakable Business

Keith Shering, MD of Critical Action, was one of the speakers at the recent, very well received “Creating An Unbreakable Business” event, held at NetSupport in Market Deeping, and organised by The Business Club, Peterborough.

As well as coordinating the speakers, Keith was one of eight subject matter experts giving business owners and decision makers quick-fire, thought-provoking 15-minute talks on what can break businesses, and what we can do to make strong, resilient businesses that survive and prosper – making businesses more unbreakable. Continue reading →