Transforming businesses with enhanced strategy alignment
Leveraging triad of Strategy delivery excellence, Project portfolio maturity enhancement & Organizational Change Management
About Acumen Plus
What do we do?
At Acumen Plus, we provide Advisory, Assessment and Assurance services , spanning across the interlinked triad of Strategy Execution, Project Portfolio Implementation and Organizational Change Management.
We seek to adopt the ‘best of breed’ approach, blending the applicable good practices across industry standards, to suit the client industry, scale of engagement and their change readiness, also leveraging applicable AI entablements to facilitate clients achieve their strategic objectives.
Our Vision
To be a trusted Advisor to Leading organizations synthesizing Enterprise strategy execution, Project Portfolio Management and Organizational Change Management for better business performance.
Our Mission
We synthesize the people, process and structure dimensions to enable better business results.
Our Approach
We commence with reviewing existing strategy definition – including organization’s vision, mission, strategic objectives.
We apply our proprietary smelevate
model – which assesses how mature is the organization is in its strategy execution across multiple dimensions.
We then assist the client in understanding where exactly are the gaps and how to ensure that the client can move up higher in the strategy execution maturity.
We especially look at the following aspects for maturity enhancement:
> What is the support given by client project portfolio management for strategy execution?
> How robust are client Management Information systems to support decision making?
> How robust are the Client Organization Change Management model for the People to support in Strategy execution?
Apart from assessment, we also give an improvement roadmap for the Client to move to higher maturity levels of strategy execution, towards delivering better business results.
Our Strategy Execution Maturity model – smelevate®:
We ascertain how mature an organization is in its strategy execution, considering diverse parameters. A brief overview of these parameters and the maturity assessment model is given herewith, which gives a ‘dipstick’ analysis on where an organization currently is and what it needs to do for better strategy execution. We leverage AI model as applicable across the maturity assessment.
Parameters concerning assessment of organizational strategy execution maturity are as under:
1. Strategy formulation and its articulation: How well the Organisational strategy (including vision, mission and strategic objectives) are formulated? Do they address changing external environment? How well they get communicated to Senior, Middle and Line Management?
2. Leadership commitment: How well top and senior leaders are committed to achieving the organizational goals? Do these goals are at the top of strategy review meetings ? Are the senior Management aware that achievement of strategic goals depends on interaction of multifarious factors – spanning people, process, technology and culture factors? Are the value systems consistently communicated and followed? How the deviations from the value systems are actioned upon? Is the Leadership open to adopt change from current AI and technology advancements?
3. Organisational Culture and workforce planning: Which is a key organizational metaphor driving the culture of the organization? Are middle and line management able to provide feedbacks if strategy is not working? How well these feedbacks are taken and actioned upon? Are the staff are empowered to take decisions within their delegated limits? Does the organization foster knowledge Management, Innovation and action on feedback? What is the level of trust and transparency ? How the feedback loops are strengthened and actioned upon?
How effective is the workforce planning and competency enhancement undertaken to achieve strategic goals?
4. Project Portfolio Management support: How strong is the project portfolio management (PPM) support for Strategy execution? Is the Project Portfolio strongly aligned with the priorities of Business portfolio – in its definition and execution? How strong are the processes, tool support and information support exists for PPM? How well the PPM capacity and capability are nurtured?
How strong is the linkage of strategy formulation and its implementation to benefits realized and budgets spent for change? And how well the Project Portfolio gets adapted with change in strategy?
5. Financial and Information Technology support : How well the Financial, and Information technology systems support the strategic objectives? Are these systems set to highlight what is working and what is not working , with specific data/ KPIs?
6. Governance, Risk and Compliance Management: How strong are the organizational Governance systems? Do they detect abnormal performance deviations, frauds and similar issues early? How strong is the organizational risk management systems ? Are the organizational systems compliant with applicable regulatory and industry frameworks and good standards?
7. Product/ Service offerings: How innovative is the organization in offering new products/ services to the market? Are these being adapted to emerging market, technology trends?
Is the organization nimble enough to restructure itself to offer the newer products/ services?
8. Marketing and Sales : Does the marketing and sales strategy support the overall organizational strategy? Does the organization have a clear segmentation of customers and have ascertained their needs? Are solutions get co-designed to address specific requirements of key customers?
9. Delivery excellence: How feedbacks from customers are addressed?: Are Product/ Service Supply chain and Delivery processes optimized to ensure value ?
Is there a Corporate culture to minimize waste and enhance efficiency?
We assess the maturity level based on our proprietary model characteristics, as applicable to target companies..
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Interlinkage of Strategy execution with Project Portfolio Implementation
One major reason for failure is, that organisations need to improve on how to convert strategy into actionable change initiatives, how to string them together in a Project portfolio and how to implement them - to realize benefits and the strategic objectives.
We in Acumen Plus use our proprietary model smelevate - to assist clients in their strategy implementation, across people, process and technology dimensions.
The smelevate model consists of Six Broad steps, broadly sequential in nature, but with appropriate feedback loops, as under:
1. Discern: Herein, we understand the Organizational strategy, its vision and mission and overall strategic goals. We also assess the Value systems of the organization, current performance levels, value gaps, issues and constraints faced and the expectations from Senior Management. AI facilitated assistance is leveraged where applicable.
2. Decompose: In this step, we work with Senior Management in decomposing the overall Value gap, into mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive value streams, with discrete targets. These value streams can form the basis of strategic themes, if the organization is using Balanced Scorecard or similar approach. Involvement from Business Leaders is ensured so that their Buy-in for the set targets gets ensured. Stakeholder engagement and Facilitation are key techniques used during this step. (Again, if an organization has already determined its value streams, we work on from there to derive the project portfolio as in next step).
3. Design : In this step, we determine the strategic initiatives (projects and programs) to be taken up for each of the Value streams, across perspectives. These perspectives can cover work to be done across processes, business organization structure, technology interventions, Information needs, Knowledge Management and Culture change requirements. Existing initiatives are taken into account - to interface with the proposed change initiatives, as needed. The overall Project Portfolio (with Sub-portfolios if need be) - gets created during this critical step. It needs to be noted that the defining the portfolio will take into account the existing Project Portfolio Management maturity, extent of support provided by the Enterprise Project Management Office (EPMO), business imperatives and funding/ resource constraints - and its definition can involve multiple iterations.
4. Deploy: In this step, the actual change initiatives (projects and programs) get launched. Proprietary project management models, alongwith industry standard methodologies ( like Agile) can be used to manage these initiatives, Extensive Business Involvement is a major differentiator, to enhance the business ownership of the developed solutions
5. Monitor: . This step goes concurrently with Deploy step, as the projects and programs are monitored, issues and risks are managed, resources are assigned and deliverables accepted by the Business, transitioning into Operations. Governance, Quality, Testing and Organizational change Management are important aspects during this step. Outcomes and Benefits are realized and managed, transforming the concerned business unit operations.
6. Adapt. Based on Lessons learnt, mid-course corrections are considered due to change in strategic priorities, resource availability and other constraints. The overall value realized by the organization due the execution of the strategic portfolio initiatives is kept under review. Project Portfolio Management maturity gets enhanced, . Knowledge databases are maintained for the organization its leverage on its past learnings.
Our Team
Our team consists of experienced consultants with diverse backgrounds in various industries. We combine our expertise to deliver innovative solutions to our clients.
Our Credentials
Acumen Plus includes Senior Professionals with over 30 years of Corporate experience, working in the areas of strategy implementation, System integration, Management Consulting and Organizational Change Management. This experience spans working for clients in the domains of manufacturing, Utilities, Government Organizations and FMCG etc, across countries including in Middle east.
Our way
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We believe in a collaborative approach to consulting, where we work closely with our clients to understand their needs and develop solutions together. Our goal is to build long-lasting relationships with our clients.
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You can write to ramani_s@hotmail.com for more details of our offerings.
Or give a message in our Whatsapp number +91 98802 80990