If you are a business owner, or an organization looking for business transformation and struggles with how to access a business transformation consultancy for innovation, agility, and the team, this blog is for you.
You might want to hire a consultancy, but how do you choose that? You need to hire a boutique consultancy to do a successful business transformation. Today, we are going to discuss how you can assess a business transformation consultancy for innovation, agility, and the team.
Let’s get started!
Innovation
Innovation is the key to successful transformation. Any consultancy that you hire should bring new ideas. New ideas are required to change and transform your business. It is important because the traditional methods to transform don’t solve today’s problems. You need a consultancy that isn’t afraid to challenge the status quo. After all, the existing methods so far result in 70% failure.
Not only does the consultancy you bring in to help you need to bring new ideas to you, but they should also be tried and tested. No one likes to be the first one (or the last one) anything new was tried and tested on (FYI – check out our tried and tested method here).
Conversely, you need to be cautious about adopting anything new and exciting. What’s fashionable right now is design thinking, value streams, and scrum squads.
Design thinking, previously known as ideation, is the new name for “workshopping.” It is essentially a problem-solving approach that has the intention to improve products (you have to question – what was the purpose of the workshop in the first place, if it wasn’t to solve problems?). Above all, it puts forth the needs of customers for solving problems.
Value streams is the rebadged new for processes. What is the point of a process? to deliver value. Processes lost it sex appeal, so now it’s been dressed up and sold as ‘value streams’. In business transformation, the intention behind a ‘value stream’ is to visualize all steps that are needed to understand how value is delivered to the customer (so shouldn’t you just focus on that, processes? probably).
Scrum squads are the new name for what Agile scrum teams call Scrum or Core Teams. Core Teams as they are generally called are multi-disciplinary (i.e. contain staff from different disciplines) and contain a mixture of project people (eg PM, BA, Developers etc.), and business people (eg SMEs, Operations staff, Leadership/Management staff etc.). There isn’t much difference between a Scrum Squad and a Scrum Team, but it’s sounds new, and therefore exciting, and relevant “we’re adopting the latest in the market” but are you?!
Punch line: all ideas are good ideas, you just need are they useful ideas? The two questions to ask to determine if these ideas are both good, and useful is, ask these two (2) questions:
- “Why consider using it i.e. how does it help?” And
- “How does it make our transformation go any faster”?
What you will find a lot of times is it won’t. It will just add more time, and therefore cost to your project, and impact the one thing you wanted to do transformation – transform the organisation.
Now, what the ‘lack of innovation’ results in, is transformation failure. What a boutique consultancy can do for you in this situation – is save you from it (failure!). There is a reason why 70% of the transformations fail. They fail because they follow the old (not innovative) methods for transformation. In most cases, these are methods that were intended to manage changes to “technology”, but not explicitly to change “business”. Additionally, you need a tried and tested, proven and trusted method.
When looking for a consultancy to help you, we recommend you hire a boutique consultancy. Why a boutique consultancy? A boutique consultancy is nimble and agile enough to try new approaches and doesn’t get caught in the bureaucracy of its larger organization peers, which ultimately leads to minimizes time and cost, and improved quality and efficiency.
Design thinking, previously known as ideation, is the new name for “workshopping.”
It is essentially a problem-solving approach that has the intention to improve products (you have to question – what was the purpose of the workshop in the first place, if it wasn’t to solve problems?). Above all, it puts forth the needs of customers for solving problems.
Value streams is the rebadged new for processes. What is the point of a process? to deliver value. Processes lost it sex appeal, so now it’s been dressed up and sold as ‘value streams’. In business transformation, the intention behind a ‘value stream’ is to visualize all steps that are needed to understand how value is delivered to the customer (so shouldn’t you just focus on that, processes? probably).
Scrum squads are the new name for what Agile scrum teams call Scrum or Core Teams. Core Teams as they are generally called are multi-disciplinary (i.e. contain staff from different disciplines) and contain a mixture of project people (eg PM, BA, Developers etc.), and business people (eg SMEs, Operations staff, Leadership/Management staff etc.). There isn’t much difference between a Scrum Squad and a Scrum Team, but it’s sounds new, and therefore exciting, and relevant “we’re adopting the latest in the market” but are you?!
Punch line: all ideas are good ideas, you just need are they useful ideas? The two questions to ask to determine if these ideas are both good, and useful is, ask these two (2) questions:
- “Why consider using it i.e. how does it help?” And
- “How does it make our transformation go any faster”?
What you will find a lot of times is it won’t. It will just add more time, and therefore cost to your project, and impact the one thing you wanted to do transformation – transform the organisation.
Now, what the ‘lack of innovation’ results in, is transformation failure. What a boutique consultancy can do for you in this situation – is save you from it (failure!). There is a reason why 70% of the transformations fail. They fail because they follow the old (not innovative) methods for transformation. In most cases, these are methods that were intended to manage changes to “technology”, but not explicitly to change “business”. Additionally, you need a tried and tested, proven and trusted method.
When looking for a consultancy to help you, we recommend you hire a boutique consultancy. Why a boutique consultancy? A boutique consultancy is nimble and agile enough to try new approaches and doesn’t get caught in the bureaucracy of its larger organization peers, which ultimately leads to minimizes time and cost, and improved quality and efficiency.
Agility
What is agility? Agility is about being ready for change, able to change, and when necessary – changing, and doing it quickly and repeatedly, which is often under pressure.
While HOBA® focuses on agility, it also takes into consideration the Current Operating Model (COM) – which everyone else wants to skip. We focus on what really needs to be changed without and not making unnecessary changes. This alone, as a result, saves countless time and money.
What features should you look for when hiring an agile consultancy?
The consultancy you hire should be flexible, not rigid. It itself should be able to adapt to the changes.
For example, our agile approach, HOBA® (House of Business Architecture®) doesn’t end at Design like other approaches – where Consultants infamously lug it (the ‘design’) over the fence to the Business and ‘hope’ they work it out (we call that ‘Hope Transformation’). HOBA® gets you from the Start-to-Transformed using our six (6) models.
Our method is trusted by hundreds of organizations around the world of all sizes – small, medium, and large, from all across the world to help with their business transformations (our method is no secret, we published it in our international bestseller book The Business Transformation Playbook here).
Always look for a consultancy firm that is agile itself by nature, like HOBA Tech for example. It will do two (2) things – first, make sure you only make necessary changes to the organisation you need to achieve your Vision, and second – because they are agile-first, they make your Organization agile too. Therefore, it makes sense to hire a consultancy that makes your business truly agile (and makes money too).
Why should you hire an agile transformation consultancy?
When you hire an agile consultancy, it provides the flexibility of adopting their chosen approach to your particular project and situation. After all, no two clients are the same, just as no two transformations are the same.
An agile consultancy allows them to adapt both their approach to suit you and your project, but also to your changing needs which happen throughout the life of the project, and transformation journey.
These types of consultancies are the ones you want to partner with, as they will help meet your changing needs and best manage your business risks through being able to adapt to changes. What you should expect working with them, is changes are delivered in shorter intervals with the project team taking on and making changes in real-time.
How hiring an agile consultancy benefits you
Hiring an agile consultancy benefits you, as it gives better control. It gives you better control through being able to anticipate changes, and being able to react and accommodate changes, which happen throughout the project.
This agility results in better productivity, as your team, and theirs are only working on value-add work, work that results in tangible outcomes, and not just doing interesting (but not useful) work – not useful, because changes have occurred but they are still working on the original now-outdated plan!
This agility ultimately results in the other one of the three (3) factors we all aim to control and improve to make your transformation successful, and that’s ‘quality’ (the other two being cost and time).
The team
A boutique consultancy works with your team in any situation. At HOBA Tech, when we help our clients, one of the first things we do, is meet with and agree with our Client’s existing team, their roles & responsibilities, so that the teamwork, decisions, and risks are managed and made in a timely manner so your transformation stays on track. If the client doesn’t have these team members on hand, our next step is to request or second them from the Business.
Do you want to know why we want to second them from the Business. Read on!
When we say ‘Clients’ team – we mean the ‘Core project team’. This team consists of staff from the Business Operations – the people doing the work. This is important because they are the people who do the work. We believe, it is the people that do the work, they are the best people to know how to improve the work.
Consultants can join your company in three (3) ways
- Bring their team
- Come on their own
- Join your team
Joining your team (number 3) is the most beneficial for you, as we bring the expertise to your team and help build your internal capability. What you end up with is a truly multidisciplinary and collaborative team that knows every detail of your business – from the people that know your business best (your people), and the expertise to help transform it!
The very first thing you do using our framework, HOBA® is to implement the Business Motivation Model (BMM). The BMM allows you towork with the team and agree on “what the end looks like” for the project and your transformation. This gets everyone across the organization clear on what the end looks like – which is also the number 1 requirement on any transformation – and that’s the Vision (download our free template here)!
Why is the VIsion so important? The Vision is so important because it enables your business to visualise, and quantify what the future looks like, how to get there (ie strategies), what the objectives are for each strategy, and how to measure progress towards it and when you have achieved it! It ensures all work you carry out on the project and programme are aligned and in service of this Vision, resulting in less work, less time, less cost, greater efficiency, and faster benefits realisation (not to mention, joining the top 30% that make business transformation a success)!
HOBA TECH Niche Boutique Consultancy
So now you know what to expect when you engage an agile boutique consultancy.
We’re always excited to help organizations have successful projects. We specialise in helping setup and cleaning up projects and programmes and get them back on track – delivering, doing what they need to do, not what sounds or looks interesting to do, which ends up wasting time, money and missing opportunities. The best part, we put in place the framework to build your own internal capability so you do it yourself, without us!
Feel free to reach out to us, contact a member of the HOBA TECH team or use the Contact Us form.
Thank you for reading this!
Sincerely,
Heath Gascoigne
P.S. If you want to join our Business Transformator community of 2000+ like-minded Business Transformators, join the community on the Business Transformator Facebook Group here.
P.P.S. If you want to learn more about business transformation, check out The Business Transformation Playbook here.
For more information, visit https://www.hoba.tech
