Throughout Norman Broadbent’s 42-year history, we have worked with clients through periods of change. The drivers of change, and the technologies involved change, but the recurring theme is always ‘how to maximise the opportunities and best leverage your organisation’s resources.’
Companies that do this well are much more agile and able to optimise performance. But that’s often the dream scenario. Change and Transformation is often unpredictable and can be expensive. As budgets become tight – or resources become strained, we sometimes have to work with our clients to find out how best to strategically work with their resources.
Change and transformation is a constant and understanding what this can look like for your organisation is a key enabler to helping your business thrive. From launching new products, changing culture, integrations and mergers to cost reduction – there is always a need for something to be done differently. The question is: how do you know you’re maximising the skills of your existing team? and who can drive the change as well as bring through the next wave of talent?
Norman Broadbent have been working closely with several our clients, ranging from FTSE100 infrastructure giants to young and ambitious FinTechs, who have a variety of drivers but with a common theme: they want to make the most of their existing teams. Regardless of size, or sector, clients want to invest, grow and uncover any gaps in their structures so they can build the teams to realise their organisational aims. Working proactively with these clients we have found that every organisation is unique and helping them to assess team capability and consequently build a framework for future success is very much a bespoke process.
Throughout our recent projects there has been a recurring need for our teams begin by working closely alongside our clients to understand what had been done to date and objectively assess how it fits with the overall strategy. Our experts work closely with the Client to create a tailored technical, behavioural and contextual framework. Our consultants do also work with professional standards like APM but we find these frameworks can be too rigid and might need to be tweaked or adopted to the organisations own ways of doing things to stand a chance of being integrated into BAU. Working through a series of facilitated workshops, we build a bespoke competency standard that works for organisation’s unique strategy and existing team structure – taking into account, for example, skills needed. Once the framework is finalised, we work with a version of our online competence system, including a full project management service to design, implement, test, launch, and support the system in operation. We find that by using some of the technology and hosting the competency framework, the project community within our clients’ organisations are efficiently able self-assess their skills against role profiles with validation from line managers.
Once all the information is collated our consultants are able to review and benchmark the organisation’s community against the framework that was built – in collaboration with the client. This allows us to use the self-assessments and conduct interviews to delve into the examples and responses given. From this we are able to give a holistic view of the skills against the portfolio and strategy but also drill down into the individual level, and talk confidently about competencies and team strengths – and weaknesses.
This data collected will identify immediate gaps areas for skills and coaching but also help our clients better prioritise upcoming projects against the skills and resources they have available. Allocating the right skills sets to the projects that come up in the pipeline is an often overlooked way of increasing efficiency and team satisfaction.
As well as the short-term benefits, projects such as this give our clients a framework and benchmark for future ways of managing projects and their teams. It helps them to build a strategic function with mapped skills and competencies against the organisation’s strategic aims, while the organisation’s senior leadership gain a strategic overview of skills within their teams, allowing them to plan projects and make sure they were optimising the skills available to them. Long term, this boosts performance on the individual projects, as well as offering targeted personal development for staff, designed to target their specific needs and improving performance and retention.
If you would like to learn more about this service offering, please contact Daniel Bruce via daniel.bruce@Normanbroadbent.com for an initial confidential discussion.