Functional Practices - Innovation & Transformation

When running a successful business, a huge part of extracting as much value and efficiency as possible is to optimise the organisation.

In order to get the most out of business operations such as mergers, turnarounds and reorganisation, Challenge Advisory aims to give our clients the advantage over their competitors.

 

What We Do

Firstly, we place each aspect of the client’s business under scrutiny in order to gain relevant information on the opportunities available to strengthen organisation. The changes identified are then implemented with a view to meeting customer needs, following through on strategy and general improvement in operations; business essentials that must be adhered to. Finally, Challenge Advisory observes the medium and long-term prospects in order to further improve organisational health and to ensure that the changes made will prove to be sustainable.

Challenge Advisory aims to maximise the potential in their clients’ business to give them a competitive advantage when it comes to talent. By reshaping recruitment strategy to meet the needs of the business, optimising the HR department and breeding top-quality clients from inside the business, the client can then develop future leaders and strengthen the dynamics of their taskforce.

We improve merger capabilities in order to find practical solutions to merging issues, and fully exploit the opportunity of synergy that is essential in a successful merger. We have constructed a number of different metrics to discern the compatibility of two merging companies. Challenge Advisory aims to produce sustained performance by assisting the client in managing their complexity by analysing linkages, internal governance, decision rights and accountabilities.

We bring a rigorous approach to our work, weighing strengths against weaknesses to identify potential threats to organisation, remove complexities and properly define accountability. We aim to ensure the business runs smoothly and derives maximum value. Challenge Advisory’s clients include major corporations, and we help our clients to form habits of continual improvement, using a wealth of knowledge to ensure any changes are properly implemented and the business behaviour adjusted to reflect any changes. The client also benefits from Challenge Advisory’s large reservoir of industry experts, allowing us to set up workshops for leaders to share their findings and insights on a global scale.

The organisation team have fifty years’ worth of experience working with global companies, and a network of consultants that ensure that every client can be catered to with ease.

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Our Expertise

Our Expertise

Human Capital - Challenge Advisory assesses business needs and workforce trends in order to develop strategies that help our clients to build top-quality talent systems by strengthening workplace dynamics and optimising HR initiatives.

Merger Management - Challenge Advisory have constructed a number of different metrics designed to facilitate mergers. We help our clients to establish culture integration, build capabilities, and realise the full potential of synergy.

Organisation Design - Challenge Advisory rigorously weighs strengths against weaknesses to identify potential threats to organisation, remove complexities and properly define accountability. This ensures smooth operation and maximum value for our clients.

Transformational Change - We help our clients to build a culture of evolution and continual improvement, whether this is through implementing organisation-wide changes, cutting costs, or moving ahead of competitors in terms of performance.

Leadership Development - Challenge Advisory develops programs that are designed to support the development of business leaders, both now and in the future, creating substantial value in the context of real-life business challenges.

Decision Effectiveness - Challenge Advisory help our clients with administrative skills, ensuring high performance by defining decision roles and accountability. We help clients to build a culture that consistently makes good decisions.

Human Capital

We help develop talent strategies tied directly to business plans—including actionable and segmented insights into talent strengths, needs, and economics. We shape clear employer value propositions focused not just on compensation but also on other key factors that matter to talented employees, including professional development. Our proprietary tools and dashboards help clients closely monitor talent plans and deployment.

Beyond meeting immediate recruitment and succession planning needs, the most successful companies use talent management as a tool to drive strategic change, innovation, effective merger integration, and long-term organizational health. We help clients define a talent agenda to support their core competitive strengths, and shape talent practices—including development, rotation, reward and recognition—to deliver business outcomes.

We work with you to customize experiential programs based on your need, and we integrate our business insights with proven development methodologies, embedding them in your real-life context for lasting impact.

To enable our clients to compete through talent, we provide foresight into key socio-demographic, regulatory, and technology trends. We help clients shape an explicit workforce strategy that is cognizant of these trends, incorporating compensation, training, employee engagement, diversity, and regulatory compliance. A key focus is on understanding, measuring, and improving workforce productivity.

We help clients turn the HR function into a highly credible business partner, driving strategic people initiatives while improving the cost, quality and speed of key services such as recruiting, training, and administration. Using our proprietary HR Navigator tool, we help HR set quantified targets, measure its performance, and demonstrate its contribution to business value.

 

Organisation Design

We go beyond “lines and boxes” to define decision rights, accountabilities, internal governance, and linkages. Our design solutions help clients manage complexity and global scale to ensure sustained performance.

We assess the strengths and weaknesses of the current organization and design a robust new structure. In the current-state assessment, our diagnostic tools highlight areas where the organization presents challenges, which might lie in its structure, linkages, or culture, and help define criteria to guide the design process. In the design itself, our design tests help clients make choices on critical questions such as the optimal business-unit structure; the role of the corporate center and shared services; and capabilities needed for pivotal roles.

We make sure the design focuses management attention on the strategic priorities and critical operations of each business unit, region, or product—be it international expansion, cost-cutting, or growth through acquisitions. Once the design is finalized, our unique implementation approach helps our clients quickly realize the economic value determined by the redesign.

Many CEOs are concerned about waste and redundant hierarchy, particularly in head offices. Our approach identifies an explicit, value-adding “mandate” for the corporate center—for example, co-ordinating key functions or driving specific strategic initiatives.

By careful design of performance-management processes, we make sure all units have clear performance measures. Our accountability tools and decision-making frameworks help identify accountabilities for cross-unit processes.

Achieving large-scale collaboration across the entire enterprise—on customer solutions, product development, innovation, and the like—can unlock tremendous value. Using our Social Network Analysis tool, we go beyond organization charts to reveal and tap into the informal communities through which the organization shares information and knowledge. We help clients understand the value collaboration can bring and the mechanisms to enable it.

Effective organization design must remove complexity that creates unnecessary cost and organizational friction, and channel what’s left to employees who are equipped to handle it. Using our proprietary complexity survey, we pinpoint issues such as a lack of role clarity or poor processes that could hinder productivity.

 

Managing Mergers

We help clients realize maximum deal value as quickly as possible by tapping the right sources of value; getting the new culture right; using the right tools and approaches to speed up integration; and building capabilities to execute the right future deals. We take a broad view of merger management, supporting clients from pre-announcement planning through post-close integration.

Because 60–75 percent of historical mergers have failed, many companies are risk averse in their integration approach. We encourage clients to “aim higher,” using our synergies framework and extensive experience to explore the entire landscape of revenue and cost opportunities. This approach has helped them identify revenue-growth opportunities that exceed due diligence estimates by 30–150 percent.

Our Organizational Health Index lets clients compare company practices along nine measurable dimensions to establish the cultural compatibility of the merging companies. A simpler version of the assessment, using publicly available information, can gauge compatibility even before deal announcement. We have catalogued more than 100 actions clients can take to mitigate the risks of culture clash.

As we help our clients execute today’s deal, we also build their capabilities for future mergers. Our Merger Management Boot Camp, an intensive workshop for integration teams, covers the entire merger process and produces practical solutions for the client’s top merger issues.

Our deep experience and proven tools accelerate successful merger integration. Our “clean teams” work behind legal firewalls until deal close, analyzing competitively sensitive data to locate potential synergies.

We have organized the Integration Council—a group of about ten senior executives with deep merger-management experience across sectors and geographies—as a source of best practices and real-world advice for our clients. Our annual merger- integration conferences, co-hosted with the Conference Board, are attended by hundreds of senior executives and integration managers, and yield valuable insights into how to deliver successful mergers.

 

Transformational Change

The ability to drive transformational change—such as moving from good to great performance, cutting costs, or turning around a crisis—is a key source of competitive advantage. Yet despite the 25,000 books published on the topic, one in three change programs fail. We work with major corporations and public services to overcome these odds.

Our deep experience and rigorous approach help clients shape successful transformation programs and build cultures of continuous improvement.

We help clients attain excellence by managing both performance and organizational health with equal rigor. “Health” can be defined as an organization’s ability to align, execute, and renew itself faster than the competition.

We help clients design and deliver far-reaching change efforts through our Five Frames methodology. This approach helps leaders shape a change vision and set targets that are tightly linked to business outcomes; diagnose the organization’s ability to meet those targets; and deliver improvement initiatives that strengthen performance, build capabilities, and change organizational mind-sets and behaviors.

Achieving sustained improvement in performance and health requires that organizations move beyond structures, processes, and systems to address individual and collective behavior—including culture, mind-sets and capabilities, and team and group dynamics. As a key aspect of creating transformational change, we work with clients to design and implement interventions to build skills, shift mind-sets, develop leaders, and manage talent to ensure a successful and sustainable change in behaviors.

Senior leaders have a unique role in transformational change: They must provide cues about what really matters for everyone in the organization to follow. We help leaders make the transformation personal, role-model the change, openly engage others, and spotlight successes. We also help build commitment and alignment within the senior team.

Organisation - Read Our Case Studies

The Challenges

Organisational Health Is Vital To A Business. What Are The Main Challenges To Improving Organisational Health?

The Challenges

Replacing the Knowledge Drain – Today’s enterprises are largely comprised of employees over the age of 40. It makes for a wise and knowledgeable task force, but as they get older and retire, more and more organisations will lack the expertise they need to thrive.

Skill Shortages – In the next twenty years, we will see an influx of younger talent, but the scarcity of jobs available means that these graduates often lack the practical knowledge and the business savvy to adapt fully to a corporate environment.

The Deskless Office – As technology proliferates and humanity evolves, the idea of a workforce working together in an office becomes increasingly obsolete.

The Experience Economy – Thanks to an aging population and untrained new workers, organisations will begin to place a larger emphasis on experience in their job advertisements, to the point that experience becomes a commodity in its own right.

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