Measuring Organizational Effectiveness: Collaborative Consulting

GROWTH: Collaboration Consulting has a set itself ambitious growth plans across all its industry verticals. It plans to increase the number of industry verticals where it can offer its services. Currently it is seen primarily as catering to telecom and insurance domains with technology consulting as the core competency. It is trying to shrug of this image primarily cultivated due to its high profile acquisition of a telecom startup consistency five years ago. The acquisition did not yield desired results due to skewed client perception and cultural integration issues with the acquired company having primary presence in Europe. Collaboration has taken a financial hit in the recent past and sold its stake in the telecom startup to a clutch of financial investors. Collaboration plans to move forward while taking stock of its current position. SUSTAIN: To sustain growth, Collaboration Consulting has started hiring new partners. Partners head various verticals at Collaboration and bring in the desired domain experience along with their networking skills. The aim of the business is to nurture talent within the organization and have 80% of its partners promoted from within the organization. A number of the new recruit partners are strengthening the existing verticals while some continue to act as entrepreneurs and start offering skills in verticals previously not serviced by Collaboration. The new partners bring about a mix of industry and academia experience. This mix helps in building a knowledge base of white papers and helping client’s purse patent registration. HARVEST: The consultancy is reaping reward in verticals where it has worked closely with clients. Collaboration has a business model where it gets invites from clients to work on short duration projects. However, the integrity and intensity it brings forward helps it gain client trust. The clients have been entrusting it with longtime engagements which typically run over a couple of years. These initiatives on Collaboration’s part started a few years ago and the consultancy has now started reaping rewards. 2. CREATES VALUE Collaboration Consulting aims at creating value for: Its clients Stakeholders Community Increased investment in intellectual capital will help clients gain from the collective and diverse experience of the hired consulting team. The stock value has seen significant erosion from the dot-com bust of year 2000. However, Collaboration has communicated to Wall Street its intention of putting the company on a fast track mode thereby increasing the revenue per share. Consistent high payout dividends are helping reward stakeholders. The consultancy supports welfare initiatives in the city where it is headquartered. It also on an ongoing basis supports initiatives in office locations across other countries. 3. Balance Score Card Collaboration Consulting follows the balance score card approach while evaluating the performance of its employees. The score card of all the employees roll up to formulate the balance score card of the Chief Executive Officer. The main aspects of the score card are: Financial Customer Process Learning and growth The scored card has been divided into various ratios for segregating the work responsibility of employees. Financial perspective has a weight of 25%, customer perspective has a weight of 40%, process a weight of 25% and learning a 10% weight. The financial weight is important as it keeps the employees focused on creating wealth for shareholders. Not all employees directly contribute to business generation and financial gains for the organization. However, the efforts of all employees roll-up to achieve broader organization goals. Customer perspective is important for the consulting business as the consultants are required to understand client brief, generate hypothesis and provide a time plan for assisting the customer. It becomes imperative that the customer perspective is an integral part of the score card to achieve the above goals. Process perspective refers to the internal business processes. Managers can track metrics relating to business perspective and services to gauge whether the business has been able to assist customer achieve their objectives. The process perspective also helps the consultancy to lay down a set of robust process that helps in client engagement, project deliverables. The processes can be broadly categorized into mission related objectives and support related objectives. Learning perspective helps in keeping pace with the expectations of customers and motivating employees. With new challenges being faced by customers, the skill sets required by the consultancy to offer effective solutions also keeps varying. At times none or only a set of people within the consultancy possess these skill sets. Hence it becomes imperative to train the employees and generate bench strength for effective customer support. Employees also have certain aspirations in acquiring skill sets when the enter the organization or as they grow in their role. To meet their aspirations training becomes necessary. On several occasions the consultancy has found that candidates that can take larger responsibilities but need guidance and training on certain aspects to be able to do justice to the enhanced role.