In today’s fast-paced, fast-changing, and increasingly competitive world, the effectiveness of business organizations has become the focus of considerable attention. When such organizations fail, the consequences can be far-reaching, even devastating.
Organizations today must function and attempt to flourish under conditions that are complex, rapidly changing, and in some respects unprecedented. The stakes are high and the risks are great. Of the 500 largest firms on the first such list published by Fortune magazine in 1956, only 29 remain. Voluntary mergers and joint ventures, hostile takeovers and poison-pill resistance to them, conglomerations and divestitures have created an organizational environment of prolonged turbulence.
Organizational Assessment
Here at Corporate Education, our consultants can study your organization and make you better understand what you can or should change to improve your ability to perform. In other words, we carry out an organisational assessment task. This comprehensive procedure, can help your organisation obtain useful data on its performance, identify important factors that aid or impede its achievement of results, and situate itself with respect to your competitors.
We have conducted Organizational Assessments on numerous government and/or private entities and made substantial changes and improvements in their total operations.
Process Modelling & Process Optimization
Theoretically, Business Process (BP) modelling creates a graphical representation of your company’s business processes or workflows, as a means of identifying potential improvements. This is usually done through different graphing methods, such as the flowchart, data-flow diagram, etc.
BP Modeling – deals specifically with low-level process maps, with the main purpose being process improvement. While business process modeling, as a concept, is extremely useful, it’s not usually used as a stand-alone. Having a graphical representation of a process is good, but without the right implementation, you won’t go too far.
The KPIs you picked to benchmark, for example, could be wrong. In that case, you wouldn’t have a realistic way to benchmark the new process to the old. To get the implementation part right, BP modeling is usually used as a part of a larger initiative such as:
Business Process Management (BPM) – A methodology of constant process re-evaluation and improvement. Just about the same thing as BPI and BPR, with the main difference being that BPM is continuous. That is, it’s not just a single process improvement initiative, it’s something you do constantly.
Business Process Improvement (BPI) – Usually part of BPM, BPI means the mapping, analysis, and improvement of a single process.
Business Process Reengineering (BPR) – Essentially the same thing as BPI, with the main difference being how you’d change the process. BPR tends to deal with more major changes to the process, such as incorporating technology to completely change the way a process works.
Multi-Layer Psychometric Assessment
A Psychometric Assessment is mostly used to measures candidates’ suitability for a role based on their intellectual capabilities and personality traits. We, at Corporate Education, also believe that giving candidates a standardised test can provide an objective assessment of who the most suitable candidates are.
According to our experience, organisations are increasingly using psychometric assessments to enhance their decision-making. Although psychometric testing is quite common, it is important to remember that it is not the be-all and end-all, but part of a wider evaluation strategy to determine who is the best person for a role.
Psychometric assessments usually cover two areas – Abilities assessments and Personality Profiling.
Abilities assessments or Aptitude Tests measure one’s intellectual capabilities as well as one’s problem-solving skills and one’s ability to understand new information in a limited timeframe.
The most common tests are:
Verbal reasoning (which assesses one’s ability to solve problems using written materials)
Numerical reasoning (which assesses one’s ability to problem solve using numbers).
Management Consultancy
If you are one of the senior managers of your organization, you would be needing an advisory person or team to assist you in improving the effectiveness of your business strategy, organisational performance and operational processes.
Our management consultants are usually hired by decision makers such as yourself, for advise on, among others, strategy and organisational matters. They can be asked to develop a new strategic plan to, for instance, realise more growth, or commissioned to advise on innovation or cost reduction strategies. Implementing the proposed solutions also belongs to their tasks, and in practice the execution side of consulting forms the largest market for management consultants. Assignments can vary from improving the efficiency of business processes, the implementation of new IT systems, outsourcing of non-core tasks or optimising the supply chain. Management consultants typically remain involved until change transitions are complete and new ways of working have become part of ‘business as usual’ operations.
Our management consultants typically do the following tasks for you:
Gather and organize information about the problem to be solved or the procedure to be improved. Interview personnel and conduct on-site observations to determine the methods, equipment, and personnel that will be needed
Analyze financial and other data, including revenue, expenditure, and employment reports, sometimes using sophisticated mathematical models
Develop solutions or alternative practices
Recommend new systems, procedures, or organizational changes
Make recommendations to management through presentations or written reports
Confer with managers to ensure the changes are working
Our management consultants work with managers and other employees of the organizations where they provide consulting services. They work as a team toward achieving the organization’s goals. They are able to think creatively to solve clients’ problems.
Change Management
Organizations go through numerous changes based on their future goals and objectives. Consequently there must be a mechanism to maintain the integrity and sustainability of these changes and avoid them rolling back to their past status. This process is called Change Management. It is a systematic approach to dealing with the transition or transformation of an organization’s goals, processes or technologies. The purpose of change management is to implement strategies for effecting change, controlling change and helping people to adapt to change. Such strategies include having a structured procedure for requesting a change, as well as mechanisms for responding to requests and following them up.
Change management can be used to manage many types of organizational change. The three most common types are:
Developmental change – Any organizational change that improves on previously established processes and procedures.
Transitional change – Change that moves an organization away from its current state to a new state in order to solve a problem, such as mergers and acquisitions and automation.
Transformational change – Change that radically and fundamentally alters the culture and operation of an organization. In transformational change, the end result may not be known. For example, a company may pursue entirely different products or markets.