“One Client told me this: “Right now we all spend some 50+ hours a week running around making things happen, doing things etc….. Now we spent 1 hour a week talking about what’s going on, reflecting on some recent experiences around current management challenges, and discussing what we could do to make things better all stimulated by some really cool management topics supported by the best Consulting Apps in the world. Then we could work with more focus, making things happen for the other 49 hours. We get now more done during the 49 hours then the original 50 hours !!”"
Consulting Tool 2.: Defining a Market/Business Unit/ Key Account for the Strategic Management Wave
A market segment is a sub-set of the business we are in (defined in step 2.1.). It is made up of people or organizations sharing with one or more characteristics that cause them to demand similar product and/or services based on qualities of those products such as price or function. A true market segment meets all of the following criteria: it is distinct from other segments (different segments have different needs), it is homogeneous within the segment (exhibits common needs); it responds similarly to a market stimulus, and it can be reached by a market intervention. The term is also used when consumers with identical product and/or service needs are divided up into groups so they can be charged different amounts. These can broadly be viewed as ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ applications of the same idea, splitting up the market into smaller groups.
A typical process starts that someone needs a strategic plan for a new or existing market segments. How this process is supported shows the following video.
Consulting Tool 3.: Assessment of the Market/BU potential- top-down
Market research is any organized effort to gather information about markets or customer demand potential. It is a very important component of business strategy Wave.The term is commonly interchanged with marketing research.
Consulting Tool 4.: Assessment of customer potential of the market -bottom-up
Customer Intelligence (CI) is the process of gathering and analysing information regarding customers; their details and their activities, in order to build deeper and more effective customer relationships and improve strategic decision making.Customer Intelligence begins with reference – basic key facts about the customer, such as their geographic location.
This data is then supplemented with transactional data – reports of customer activity. This can be commercial information (for example purchase history from sales and order processing), interactions from service contacts over the phone and via e-mail.
4.1. Explaining the tool: please watch the videos:
Consulting Tool 5.: Assessment of the product potential of the market-top-down
A product manager researches, selects, develops, and places a company’s products, performing the activity of product management.
A product manager considers numerous factors such as target demographic, the products offered by the competition, and how well the product fits in with the company’s business model. Generally, a product manager manages one or more tangible products.
Consulting Tool 6: Assessment of the opportunity potential of the market-bottom-up
A customer opportunity emerges if a product or a service, based on either one technology or several, fulfills the need(s) of a (preferably increasing) customer better than the competition and better than substitution-technologies.
Market Dynamics has a typical life cycle which needs to be managed:
Market life cycle management is the succession of strategies used by business management as a market goes through its life cycle. The conditions in which products are sold (advertising, saturation) changes over time and must be managed as they move through the succession of stages.
Competitor analysis in marketing and strategic management is an assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of current and potential competitors. This analysis provides both an offensive and defensive strategic context through which to identify opportunities and threats. Competitor profiling coalesces all of the relevant sources of competitor analysis into one framework in the support of efficient and effective strategy formulation, implementation, monitoring and adjustment.
Consulting Tool 9.: Evaluate the market attractiveness
Attractiveness in this context refers to the overall industry profitability. An “unattractive” industry is one in which the combination of these forces mentioned below acts to drive down overall profitability. A very unattractive industry would be one approaching “pure competition”, in which available profits for all firms are driven down to zero.
Market forces:
* Size of market
* Market rate of growth.
* The nature of competition and its diversity.
* Profit margin.
* Impact of technology, the law, and energy efficiency.
(After opening the Link, click on English to continue)
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Consulting Tool 10.: Review your market position and Norm Strategy
Positioning is facilitated by a graphical technique called perceptual mapping, various survey techniques, and statistical techniques like multi dimensional scaling, factor analysis, conjoint analysis, and logit analysis.
Norm strategy refers to the strategies of single business unit in a diversified corporation. According to Michael Porter, a firm must formulate a business strategy that incorporates either cost leadership,differentiation or focus in order to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage and long-term success in its chosen areas or industries. Alternatively an organization can achieve high growth and profits by creating a Blue Ocean Strategy that breaks the previous value-cost tradeoff by simultaneously pursuing both differentiation and low cost.McKinsey also offers three Norm Strategies: Grow, select, restructure.
Consulting Tool 11. Define SWOT and create Initiatives
SWOT analysis is a strategic planning method used to evaluate the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats involved in a projector in a business venture. It involves specifying the objective of the business venture or project and identifying the internal and external factors that are favorable and unfavorable to achieve that objective.
A SWOT analysis must first start with defining a desired end state or objective.
Strengths: attributes of the person or company that are helpful to achieving the objective(s).
Weaknesses: attributes of the person or company that are harmful to achieving the objective(s).
Opportunities: external conditions that are helpful to achieving the objective(s).
Threats: external conditions which could do damage to the objective(s).
Consulting Tool 12.: Define the Restructuring Road Map
Restructuring is the corporate management term for the act of reorganizing the legal, ownership, operational, or other structures of acompany for the purpose of making it more profitable, or better organized for its present needs. Alternate reasons for restructuring include a change of ownership or ownership structure, demerger, or a response to a crisis or major change in the business such as bankruptcy,repositioning, or buyout. Restructuring may also be described as corporate restructuring, debt restructuring and financial restructuring.
Consulting Tool 13.: Design the Company Service Program
A service is the intangible equivalent of a good. Service provision is often an economic activity where the buyer does not generally, except by exclusive contract, obtain exclusive ownership of the thing purchased. The benefits of such a service, if priced, are held to be self-evident in the buyers willingness to pay for it. Public services are those society pays for as a whole through taxes and other means.
Consulting Tool 14.: Set strategic targets and develop business strategy
One of the most valuable concepts in the strategic management of multi-divisional companies was portfolio theory. It was concluded that a broad portfolio of financial assets could reduce specific risk. In the 1970s marketers extended the theory to product portfolio decisions and managerial strategists extended it to operating division portfolios. Each of a company’s operating divisions were seen as an element in the corporate portfolio. Each operating division (also called strategic business units) was treated as a semi-independent profit center with its own revenues, costs, objectives, and strategies. Several techniques were developed to analyze the relationships between elements in a portfolio. B.C.G. Analysis, for example, was developed by the Boston Consulting Group in the early 1970s. This was the theory that gave us the wonderful image of a CEO sitting on a stool milking a cash cow. Shortly after that the G.E. multi factoral model was developed by General Electric and McKinsey. Companies continued to diversify until the 1980s when it was realized that in many cases a portfolio of operating divisions was worth more as separate completely independent companies.
Here the management defines the Value Gap which defines the difference between an organization`s aspiration and its reality. Example: Reduce Cost of Service by 30%, Sell more to each customers. Get more Customers.
How to close the value gap is the essence of the strategy development process.
Open innovation is a paradigm that assumes that firms can and should use external ideas as well as internal ideas, and internal and external paths to market, as the firms look to advance their technology.The boundaries between a firm and its environment have become more permeable; innovations can easily transfer inward and outward. The central idea behind open innovation is that in a world of widely distributed knowledge, companies cannot afford to rely entirely on their own research, but should instead buy or license processes or inventions (e.g. patents) from other companies. In addition, internal inventions not being used in a firm’s business should be taken outside the company.
Consulting Tool 16.: Plan Financials and allocate Investments & Resources
In business, a financial plan can refer to the three primary financial statements (balance sheet,income statement, and cash flow statement) created within a business plan. Financial forecastor financial plan can also refer to an annual projection of income and expenses for a company, division or department. A financial plan can also be an estimation of cash needs and a decision on how to raise the cash, such as through borrowing or issuing additional shares in a company.
Consulting Tool 17.: Review future state of business with scenario planning
Scenario planning, also called scenario thinking or scenario analysis, is a strategic planning method that some organizations use to make flexible long-term plans. It is in large part an adaptation and generalization of classic methods used by military intelligence.
Scenario planning may involve aspects of Systems thinking, specifically the recognition that many factors may combine in complex ways to create sometime surprising futures (due to non-linear feedback loops). The method also allows the inclusion of factors that are difficult to formalize, such as novel insights about the future, deep shifts in values, unprecedented regulations or inventions. Systems thinking used in conjunction with scenario planning leads to plausible scenario story lines because the causal relationship between factors can be demonstrated. In these cases when scenario planning is integrated with a systems thinking approach to scenario development, it is sometimes referred to as structural dynamics.
Consulting Tool 18.: Articulate the Strategy through Strategy Maps and Scorecards
The balanced scorecard (BSC) is a strategic performance management tool – a semi-standard structured report supported by proven design methods and automation tools that can be used by managers to keep track of the execution of activities by staff within their control and monitor the consequences arising from these actions. It is perhaps the best known of several such frameworks, and was widely adopted in English speaking western countries and Scandinavia in the early 1990s. Since 2000, use of Balanced Scorecard, its derivatives (e.g.performance prism), and other similar tools (e.g. Results Based Management) have become common in the Middle East, Asia and Spanish-speaking countries also.
Consulting Tool 21.: Manage your joint documents in the cloud
Cloud computing is Internet-based computing, whereby shared resources, software and information are provided to computers and other devices on-demand, like the electricity grid.
It is a paradigm shift following the shift from mainframe to client–server that preceded it in the early 1980s. Details are abstracted from the users who no longer have need of expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure “in the cloud” that supports them.Cloud computing describes a new supplement, consumption and delivery model for IT services based on the Internet, and it typically involves the provision of dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources as a service over the Internet. It is a byproduct and consequence of the ease-of-access to remote computing sites provided by the Internet.
The term “cloud” is used as a metaphor for the Internet, based on the cloud drawing used in the past to represent the telephone network, and later to depict the Internet in computer network diagrams as an abstraction of the underlying infrastructure it represents.Typical cloud computing providers deliver common business applications online which are accessed from another web service or software like a web browser, while the software and data are stored on servers.
Most cloud computing infrastructure consists of reliable services delivered through data centers and built on servers. Clouds often appear as single points of access for all consumers’ computing needs. Commercial offerings are generally expected to meet quality of service (QoS) requirements of customers and typically offer SLAs. The major cloud service providers include Savvis, Amazon, Google and Microsoft and TMG Munich.
Key Account Management: The management of the customer relationships that are most important to a company. Key accounts are those held by customers who produce most profit for a company or have the potential to do so, or those who are of strategic importance. Development of these customer relations and customer retention is important to business success. Particular emphasis is placed on analyzing which accounts are key to a company at any one time, determining the needs of these particular customers, and implementing procedures to ensure that they receive premium customer service and to increase customer satisfaction.
Marketing Campaigns are the processes by which companies create customer interest in products or services. It generates the strategy that underlies sales techniques, business communication, and business development. It is an integrated process through which companies create value for customers and build strong customer relationships in order to capture value from customers in return.
Performance management includes activities to ensure that goals are consistently being met in an effective and efficient manner. Performance management can focus on performance of the organization, a department, processes to build a product or service, employees, etc.
Project management is the discipline of planning, organizing, and managing resources to bring about the successful completion of specific project goals and objectives. It is sometimes conflated with program management, however technically a program is actually a higher level construct: a group of related and somehow interdependent projects.
A project is a temporary endeavor, having a defined beginning and end (usually constrained by date, but can be by funding or deliverables), undertaken to meet unique goals and objectives, usually to bring about beneficial change or added value. The temporary nature of projects stands in contrast to business as usual (or operations, which are repetitive, permanent or semi-permanent functional work to produce products or services. In practice, the management of these two systems is often found to be quite different, and as such requires the development of distinct technical skills and the adoption of separate management.
The primary challenge of project management is to achieve all of the project goals and objectives while honoring the preconceived project constraints.Typical constraints are scope, time, and budget. The secondary—and more ambitious—challenge is to optimize the allocation and integration of inputs necessary to meet pre-defined objectives.
