Areas of Focus

Our services focus on 5 independent areas:

1. Crafting a Vision
Helping you paint a persuasive picture of the destination you aspire to, a vision with clear supporting indicators around which the extended management team are fully aligned. Such a well thought out inspirational visions provides clear direction to everyone, acts as a rallying call to your people and provides the basis of communication to all stakeholders.

2. Developing Implementable Strategies
We help objectively, to drive the full cycle of strategic management, from challenging the leadership team’s assumptions and ambition to identifying your unique capabilities and their strategic relevance, developing clear strategic initiatives and implementation roadmaps, to execution and ongoing evaluation, and change governance. A distinguishing mark of our approach is to think of implementation from the outset, engaging the people who will be critical to successful execution.

3. Creating the Change-able Organisation
Deciphering and changing organisation cultures – mindset, values and behaviours, redesigning organisation structures, embedding strategic managerial capability and disciplines, and aligning all other elements such as measurement, technology, human resources and core processes with the company’s strategy. In many cases it is necessary to establish a dedicated change unit.

4. Achieving Distinctive Customer Focus
Creating a truly customer focussed organisation one that stands out from the pack. This means creating a ‘sense and respond’ capability based on a competitive product set, supported by coherent easy-to-use- systems, finger-tip information, employees with the right combination of skills and commitment to customer care. The secret is to empower front line employees to focus ruthlessly on attracting and strengthening the customer relationship while at the same time complying with clear boundary conditions.

5. Creating the Innovation-able Organisation
We consider innovation to be wider that R&D and assist in creating the necessary environment to unleash the power of your business systems, capability and culture, to make the whole organisation innovation-able including mastering the vital innovation-to-commercialization process.

How We Do It - Service Types

We deliver our expertise in these four areas via:

• Hands-on Consultant Support
• Board and Senior Team Briefings.
• Tailored In-company Learning Workshops.
• Public Learning Workshops, i.e.

To find out more about our services please contact us at info@advancedorganisation.com or call: +353 1 668 8684.

Sample Cases

In the past five years alone Advanced Organisation has worked with over 30 different client companies. The sectors involved included Healthcare, Pharmaceuticals, FMCG, Financial Services, Public Sector, ICT and Communications, Food and Beverage, Retail, Energy, Media, Construction, Higher Education and NGO’s.

Services provided ranged from strategy development - business, functional and innovation - to strategy execution.

Notwithstanding strategy development work, all of our solutions are tied to strategic agenda and performance indicators, in other words, to execution. Our strategy execution work includes solutions for strategic project implementation, organisation restructuring, preparing leadership teams for business transformation, culture change and capability development programmes.

A feature of our approach is that we work through multidisciplinary teams made up of executives, senior managers and other key players.

For more information on the cases and the opportunity to speak directly with some of our clients please contact us at info@advancedorganisaiton.com

Case 1: Global Pharmaceutical Manufacturer - Innovation Strategy

Challenge
Global and corporate environment is one of excess capacity, changing areas of focus in terms of customer segments, product types and a relentless drive for cost efficiencies.

Insight
Local operations have been a cornerstone of the success for the corporate supply business. Over several years the Irish supply business has developed a wealth of resources and capabilities that can be better leveraged to benefit the corporation.

Action
Involved a diagonal section of 50 leaders in a highly structured and participative strategic innovation programme. Over a 6 month period, ‘state of the art’ innovation tools and process and education workshops were used with customer and service-focused teams. Teams yielded up to 100 growth and bottom-line opportunities for the wider business.

Opportunities were categorised and prioritised and several have progressed into innovation projects with specific business results identified.

Results
A portfolio of innovation projects identified and launched, focussed on tangible results. Ongoing innovation capability and system has been significantly increased.

Case 2: Global FMCG - Increasing Organisational Energy and Performance

Challenge
European manufacturing business identified the need to engage their people better as the business continues to face environmental challenges and internal drive for year on year performance improvement.

Insight
Relentless focus on continuous improvement programmes and new management systems, while intended to simplify and automate, had resulted in managers becoming less connected with their people.

Action
After internal inquiry, insight development and ‘state of the art’ external research activities, we co-developed a fresh approach to employee engagement. Engagement was defined as about “People putting their maximum energy into the success of the enterprise and critically, being in a place where they feel they can flourish”.

The model recognises four sources of energy - physical, emotional, mental and spiritual – that impact on both our work and home life.

The engagement framework, with accompanying tools, was embedded in the global organisation via toolkits, manager workshops and online resources.

Results
Early pilot results led to significant increases in engagement scores and performance indexes. In the case of one division ‘Highly Engaged’ scores increased by 75%.

Case 3: Large Communication and Retail Business - Transformation

Challenge
Business facing increased competition due to European deregulation. Executive team focused on increasing service levels, reducing costs and increasing profits in a declining market.

Insight
After several years of relative stability and a series of rationalisation programmes, leadership recognised they were not equipped to lead transformation and develop the business for full open competition.

Action
Facilitated the executive team in a corporate vision and strategy exercise.

Following the strategy exercise and several manager workshops, developed a 13-day Business and Leadership Development Programme for executives and senior managers (240 in total). Programme specifically built for the execution of the corporate strategy e.g. quality customer service, commercial success, engaged and energised staff, cost competitiveness and innovation.

Strong emphasis on development as leaders focused on personal and business results.

Programme design led to each participant identifying and scoping a ‘rapid results’ project linked to the corporate strategic agenda.

In tandem worked with managers to develop management infrastructure. This ensured transfer of learning and that projects would flourish ‘back at the ranch’.

Trained director and next level down in performance coaching techniques and behaviours.

Senior leaders coached direct reports through the 6 month programme.

Results
CEO described a “discernable change for the better in senior managers who have participated in the programme”.

Unique projects ranging from service improvement, cost reduction and business model innovation amount to potential savings which equate to 16% annual revenue.

A major emphasis of the programme was on service level improvement. In parallel with the programme, service levels have improved by 7% to date.

Case 4: Natural Resource Management Company - Innovation and Transformation

Challenge
The Company developed an exciting and ambitious corporate strategy that focussed on core business development and diversification into renewable energy and communications businesses.

Business faced with an unprecedented transformation agenda to execute the strategy in a very tough operating environment.

Insight
Coming from a dominant business position in their core business, managers had not faced change of this magnitude. While the strategy was shared and known about, the wider leadership group had yet to commit to delivery. Insight was that they did not fully understand the strategy and its implications and felt that they were not ready for this level of change.

Action
Worked with executive team and wider leadership group to define the company vision and strategic execution agenda. This included defining key performance indicators and accompanying initiatives. The backbone of this leadership series was the Advanced Organisation Transformation Architecture.

This leadership series provided education as well as hands-on support and coaching. In parallel worked with a select group of leaders from across the business as part of an innovation programme.

The programme had four Rapid Innovation Project Teams focused on the 3 different business divisions and one team on central support. The programme ran for 6 months and identified and developed an innovation portfolio.

Designed and developed a culture change programme based on the corporate vision.

Results
Strategic dashboard defined and all business activity is aligned. Every senior manager has a strategic plan to which they have committed. It is aligned to their performance and effectively communicated by them to their direct reports.

Readiness of senior team to lead transformation had increased by 60% post Advanced Organisation support.

Six projects ranging from business model innovation, internal efficiency, route to market and new product marketing were developed and launched. In addition, several innovation trawls yielded a wider portfolio of 40 innovation opportunities that are currently being managed for development, hold or park.

Small transformation office established to provide standards, tracking and support through line managers.

Senior mangers have engaged 2,000+ staff in strategy and culture change workshops.

Case 5: Building Innovation Capability in Eight Environmental SMEs

Challenge
As part of a programme supported by Enterprise Ireland, eight high-growth environmental SME’s ranging from wind, biomass and wave energy to plastics and recycling business needed support to scale and increase their innovation capability.

Insight
Companies needed fast, highly effective support.

Action
Range of actions included organisation design, development of sales model and incentives to promote rapid growth, and development of strategies to enhance customer experience. Conducted innovation workshops with senior executives to identify service innovation opportunities.

Results
Early feedback is that support has greatly facilitated growing the businesses. It has also helped companies overcome growing pains and has allowed senior managers to focus on medium to longer term opportunities.