Consulting

The Engagement Process

When you contact us to learn more about how we can help you, we will first talk with you about your needs and goals. We will work with you to define measurable goals for the business value the project will deliver. Once the goals are defined, we will develop a proposal outlining the specific things that we will do to help you achieve your objectives.

Business Objectives

The types of objectives that we set with our clients include such things as:

• Greater strategic latitude
  • Improve ability to sense changes in customer demand.
  • Increase the number of strategic options available without increasing costs.
  • Rapidly deploy a shift in company strategy to reduce risk of failure in execution.
• Faster time to market for innovation
  • Lower overall development time for a critical new product.
  • Reduce the number of unnecessary design loopbacks in product development.
  • Decrease the amount of time it takes to transition a new product into manufacturing.
• Lower development costs and increase development capacity
  • Deliver six new products in the next cycle with the same resources it took to deliver four this time.
  • Manage increasing design complexity with the same number of resources.
  • Reduce tooling costs driven by unnecessary rework.
• Lower product costs and improve product quality
  • Reduce product cost for the new generation of products over current estimates.
  • Reduce the number of post-production defects and ECOs.
  • Reduce the number of installation-related support calls.

Consulting Services Examples

Here are some examples of the types of services we have provided to support business objectives:

• Strategy development to maximize strategic latitude.
  • Interviews with executives.
  • Strategic planning sessions to map out a convergent process for making strategic decisions.
  • Recommendations for specific actions to drive increased strategic latitude.
• Current state assessments and future state development
  • Interviews with team members
  • Group retrospectives reviewing the strengths and weaknesses of past programs.
  • Value stream mapping at either the framework or the micro-process level. For more information on this, please see my article "Effective Value Stream Mapping in Product Development."
  • Recommendations for specific actions to drive rapid performance improvements.
• Organizational transformation support
  • Organizational structure designs to maximize effectiveness
  • Strategies to align the organization and the environment around new expectations
  • Change management and communication plans
• Targeted Assistance with Leadership
  • 360° assessments of business leaders
  • Job descriptions and performance measures
  • Interviewing strategies and vetting new hires