From paper to lived culture – We help you bring your strategy to life
Surely you are familiar with the situation: you order a piece of furniture and instead of the fully assembled product, you get one or more boxes containing many individual parts. Sometimes components are missing or damaged. The more-or-less comprehensible assembly instructions are often overwhelming you and you are left completely to your own devices. It often requires some fantasy to imagine the final product. When the piece of furniture is then assembled, it is often not like you had imagined it.
Our clients often feel the same way after strategy consultancies have developed new concepts and strategies for them. Companies generally engage a strategic consultancy when they need help making complex strategic decision, such as about their business model, products or value proposition, or to answer fundamental questions, such as: Are we ideally positioned in lieu of the expected or anticipated micro- and macroeconomic, socioeconomic, political and other conditions? Top strategy consultancies provide profound technical and industry knowledge (“insight and foresight”) to selected managers and company experts to answer these complex questions and develop strategic options. Only a very small, exclusive part of the company is involved in the creation of the final strategic plan.
In other words, the finished piece of furniture – usually sketched out as a rough picture, often without precise assembly instructions, unassembled and not yet in the actual home.
This is where acondas comes in.
A variety of new challenges arise in implementing and communicating strategic decisions, because the strategy has to be brought to life. Numerous questions arise that must be answered in advance of implementation, such as:
How will the strategic action recommendation or the new strategy impact…
- processes and workflows?
- underlying IT systems?
- customer and supplier interfaces?
- responsibilities?
- (new) required competencies among the workforce?
- employee work content?
As an implementation consultancy, we offer support in identifying, structuring and answering the questions that arise and challenge companies along each step toward implementing new strategies.
The first phase in strategy implementation is strategy translation, which we support by providing a strong understanding of the strategic recommendations for action and deep insight into the organization of the company. The process involves formulating all translation issues as implementation steps, deriving specific tasks, and planning them taking a project or program approach. To help you achieve success in this phase, we provide high skills in structuring and prioritizing complex content.
Following the completion of this phase, the second is strategy implementation, in which we drive implementation forward actively. This involves supporting the company project leader and ensuring that all implementation tasks are processed on time and in fulfilment of quality standards, that any problems and questions that arise are resolved, and that all requisite decisions are made. Critically, we also ensure that all affected employees are included in the implementation process. This demands not only effective project management, but also strong change management, to convince the company employees that the changes are meaningful and necessary, to build up the necessary competencies, and to permanently change attitudes and behaviors. Our mission is to ensure that everyone ultimately embraces and lives the implemented strategic changes.
Unlike strategy development, strategy implementation always involves close collaboration between consultants and many different employees across a wide range departments in the company. To work with the organization successfully to drive and achieve sustainable change, we provide a high degree of empathy and excellent interaction skills, as well as a deep understanding of how the company thinks and works.
Here at acondas, strategy implementation means: Bringing Strategies to Life! In other words, we help ensure that the furniture in your home is assembled right, appeals to everyone and is used by everyone with pleasure.