What are the TOP 5 THINGS BUSINESS LEADERS DON'T KNOW about their organizations?
Find out below!Professional. Pragmatic. Innovative.
Cross industry expertise for your business.NEXSYS Business Consulting Packages
Professional Services EngagementTHE TOP 5 THINGS BUSINESS LEADERS DON’T KNOW ABOUT THEIR ORGANIZATIONS
Most good business leaders have a solid grasp of the key performance indicators for their companies. These may include customer churn, market share, input costs, profit margins, time-to-delivery thresholds, service levels, regulatory compliance, finance, cashflow, etc,. But a strong majority lack the following information when making both key and daily business decisions. Ask yourself if you have the following up-to-date visibility and insight into your business in an easily consumable and comprehensive format.
Business Capability
You need to have a discernible depiction of your business capabilities to act as a clear translator between your business stakeholders. This is not only key to making the right decisions but to also achieving buy-in from the rest of your organization.
A business capability model or map describes “what” your business does, rather than the “how”. This illustrates the business architecture of what your business capabilities are and which resources go into them. The knowledge it provides is key to making your best business decisions. Are your company’s efforts aligned with the core business capabilities that differentiate you in the marketplace and best serve the goals of your organization? Or are focus, efforts and resources improperly allocated because you don’t have this clear picture?
Once established, the “what” your company does remains fairly static, allowing for more strategic thinking when you have the right information about your business capabilities available, even as tactical “how” changes are made to your processes in response to changing market forces and opportunities when they present themselves. Providing an overlay of key business metrics over an organization’s capabilities can prove absolutely invaluable to leadership and key decision makers.
Business Processes
You need an awareness of the processes that support your business and a detailed understanding of those primary business processes that make or break your company’s success.
The vital systems of your company are much more than a composition of software and hardware. If business capabilities illustrate “what” your company does, business processes describe “how” your company achieves its goals. Processes are the systematic, repeatable ways you execute on business and supporting services within your organization. Few companies have a solid definition of their vital business processes, much less models of the key processes critical to their value proposition to their customers. There are important strategic and tactical advantages for companies that can keep these in sight and top-of-mind as they operate through the course of their daily business.
IT Health
You need to know that your supporting systems are going to be there for you every day, in every way, and that they are achieving what you are paying good money for.
Information technology brings astonishing capabilities to business. It is also an expensive cost of doing business. Just because it is working doesn’t mean it’s healthy. Like our bodies, the fitness of your organization measures your ability to thrive in the good times and sustain focus and drive during the downturns. Business leaders need to understand what areas of their technology ecosystem are at risk; and, also, by aligning their systems with core business capabilities they can more effectively manage resource allocation and IT budgets, while successfully proving return on investment and investment payback periods.
Application Portfolio Management
You need to know what tools you have in your toolkit, which tools need to be sharpened, and which tools should be discarded altogether.
Most key business processes these days live and breath by the software that supports their task activities and workflows. Often, as processes evolve, significantly change, or as is often the case, are not very well understood, additional software is thrown at challenges, which not only creates deployment complications, disparate data sources, and additional purchase, support and maintenance costs, but also adds to systems environment complexity making further future technology moves more risky, costly and sometimes prohibitively impossible. Understanding the current state of your software stack is imperative if you want a smooth running machine to support your business. Effective application portfolio management doesn’t require a complex system for most small to medium-sized businesses; effective management can be achieved simply by using the right spreadsheet, which includes the appropriate data points and meta-data about your software.
Business Rules, Requirements and Acceptance Criteria
You need to articulate the business rules that you operate by, define the principle requirements that must be met by your systems and processes, and the clear acceptance criteria by which changes in your company are to be measured.
Eliciting accurate business requirements has always been a challenge for companies. Even in the realms of agile project management, clarity is key. Without the proper methods to capture, articulate and maintain relevant business rules, requirements and acceptance criteria, it is a challenge to convey to business leadership and management what their key systems and processes are doing, if they are doing them properly, and proving their effectiveness for the company when either evaluating future options or imperative challenges arise.
“What gets measured gets managed.” – Peter Drucker, American management guru (1909 – 2005)
Imagine having this information at your fingertips when you need to make those important business decisions. Most business leaders are limited to only one, two or none of the above to assist them in responding to the opportunities and challenges of the day, quarter and year.
Side Note: Anecdotally, I have discovered that having the above knowledge is also highly motivating and empowering for staff. Reviewing and maintaining the above five aspects of a business builds confidence in your employees and gives them a much greater sense of being an integral part of the organization and often develops true thought leaders and ambitious staff throughout the organization.
Developing these five key business assets is not hard. They just take the time and resolve to create them; and having an experienced person with proven methods to help you properly get to completion acts as a significant accelerator to achieving the outcomes you need. This is easily your best time and money spent.
“If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, you don’t know what you’re doing.” – W. Edwards Deming
So what you really need is …
- a solid view of where your valuable IT spend is focused
- an accurate understanding of how your staff is aligned with your value stream processes
- to know when and where the right time is to apply new technology solutions
- to be in the very best position to respond to coming opportunities and threats
- to be ahead of the market curve with information to out think your competitors and meet your customers where they are headed
- to be ready for acquisition opportunities before they arise
Consulting Engagement
Senior business and systems consulting engagement made easy.
With over twenty years of business and systems consulting experience for major clients across North America and the United Kingdom, I bring both a breadth and depth of experience to the companies I serve. I have been successfully engaged with large clients for over two decades; however, I am now ready for a shift. I have devised a solution that allows me to provide my expertise to smaller and mid-sized companies who can benefit from my experience, which I will explain further below. Suffice it to say I am very excited about this new engagement model that allows me to reach those exciting companies that would otherwise be unable to secure my services.
While I bring a range of technical and business experience to the table, my focus is on delivering solutions for the top five things business leaders still need to enhance their decision making. It’s how I know I can make a real difference and provide material value to my clients.
Please read on to understand why I am doing this.
TWO MILLION DOLLARS in two months?!
That’s just the cost of doing business when your annual IT budget is 200 million dollars and you’ve engaged a team of consultants for your enterprise initiative.
How can organizations with smaller budgets get the senior consulting expertise they need?
technology | business capability | business process | business analysis | project management
WHY I Do What I Do
Making a difference that thrills my clients.
Over the past twenty years, I have had the privilege to work with world-class companies providing them with solutions that have either generated or saved millions of dollars per year. Large, complex enterprise engagements such as these have their definite upsides and I feel proud to have provided such substantial value over the years. However, after decades of consulting to large corporations, I wanted to try to solve a new problem.
I strove to find a way that I could support vibrant and growing small and mid-sized businesses while promoting my personal desire for location independent consulting (which you can learn more about why in the section about me personally below).
Some of my best memories and experiences have been those engagements with explosive-growth start-ups. There is something unique and fascinating about those smaller, fast-growing companies that the large enterprises simply cannot match in terms of innovation, culture and agility backed against an unparalleled drive that makes working with them and boosting their business value so rewarding.
Because I have chosen to offer my consulting services in more affordable time slices with my consulting packages, it opens up greater opportunities to serve intriguing new organizations, and I can continue to enjoy the personal benefits of an agile, traveling lifestyle. The best business value is always derived from a solid win-win, and this is how I can do exactly that.
It is thrilling for me to be able to give stellar companies a solid business advantage through my proven experience who might not have been able to engage me before. My motivation is to share my expertise and experience with exciting and enthusiastic companies, getting to know what makes them tick, and to provide the means to articulate that knowledge in a way that creates a strong advantage to that company’s business leadership and staff.
Find out how I can help you and your company achieve the insight you need to win this game of business by continuing to read below.
HOW I Provide Value
Offering my clients a clear advantage through carefully articulated business models and deliverables.
My goal is to bring value to your company. Not to become invaluable. I engage and mentor your people so that the knowledge gained stays with you.
We get to the desired results by providing ways to view the big picture and drill down to operable levels of information by taking a systems thinking approach; and by this I do not mean technology. We want to reign in the information chaos and present it in digestible ways so that it can be effectively leveraged in your decision making.
If we were talking about a large enterprise engagement, we might go down the path of getting integrated systems in place to assemble data from their various sources of truth and consolidate it in advanced reporting solutions. That’s not what we are talking about here. It’s unlikely that you have IT budgets that range in the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. Instead, we are talking about simple but effective solutions suited to the size and stage of your business. Solutions without getting complicated.
One important point I like to drive home is that I try to stay as “technology agnostic” as possible when modeling your business domain and processes. The reason being is that this keeps us agile and open to future options while keeping current solutions fresh and simple, but with an eye to possible future migrations. The key is to know where your knowledge is at and be able to use it to make more effective decisions for you company.
One of my key virtues in consulting is professional courtesy. It is about being professional in interactions with my clients, maintaining respect and politeness, being approachable and friendly, and still be willing to speak up (with compassion) when something looks questionable, critique with kindness, but be willing to call out issues when necessary.
Eliciting information from the right people is key. Consultants often go wrong by assuming they are the ones who know everything. The best consultants engage the smart people already in the organization, the ones doing the work on the ground. The key is that the client has the answers, the knowledge and the business intelligence; they just need help drawing it out and together articulating it into consumable information provided by proven methods and approaches. That’s what I am here to assist you with. It is my job to draw on my experience and help you achieve your goals. I facilitate the acquisition of the knowledge you already have within your organization.
This is how we can empower your business decision making.
WHAT I Can Provide
Bringing expert methods, designs and extensive experience to accelerate the business domain knowledge needs of my clients.
Imagine being able to understand, at a glance, which vital areas of your business are being best served by your systems and processes and which ones need attention …
Business Capability Mapping – We will map your organization based upon capabilities, not org charts, with a delineation between your Core Business and Business & Support Services. This makes it very clear to you and your teams “what” your company does and provides a unifying language and picture to empower strategic decision making. To this map we can overlay the metrics you need to make various decisions, supported by data captured and easily maintained in custom spreadsheets that I will provide you. We will work together to decide what information is of most interest to you and pull that together. For example, this could include, IT costs by capability, or staff levels and dollar allocations by capability, or vital process markers base upon alignment with strategic goals. Ultimately it is about providing a universal translator for discussing appropriate levels of focus in areas of your business against the value proposition those capabilities provide your business and your customers.
Business Process Modeling – The first exercise is to list your processes, and then identify and classify as primary (core business), secondary (core business supporting) and ancillary (standard operational functions) processes. We then model the business process flows and capturing narratives and human and system touch points for those processes that are key to business growth. It’s not necessary to model all processes; but having an awareness of your breadth of processes is important and it is something that we can achieve together.
IT / Business Health – Based upon your business vision and strategic goals, with an awareness of your tactical issues at hand, we define ways to measure and evaluate IT health on an ongoing, proactive basis, rather than leaving you to react to coming challenges. For small and mid-sized organizations, this can be easily handled by spreadsheets, dashboards, pivot tables and regular presentation updates.
Application Portfolio Management – To manage both the cost and maintenance of your valuable software assets, we can catalog, classify and prioritize your application stack to ensure you remain secure, up to date and cost effective. Often application rationalization opportunities present themselves when application redundancies are identified in your portfolio. I have saved larger companies millions of dollars in annual IT spend per year by performing an application rationalization exercise to understand where IT dollars are being over spent. Your company may have opportunities with similar redundancies, as well.
Business Rules, Requirements and Acceptance Criteria – Business rules, business requirements and associated acceptance criteria form the foundations for most of your application systems and business processes. Far too often these are cobbled together in reaction to a project, where as, for key aspects of your business, maintaining these can be a significant time saver and critical to making the right decisions when costly changes or opportunities in process or technology are needed. Developing proper business cases without this sort of base business detail becomes more challenging than it should be if you had these valuable assets at hand.
And more – Depending on your needs, we can also develop supporting tools such as company dashboards and KPI visibility, technology roadmaps, establish governance committees, create custom spreadsheet tools and document templates to help keep your organization organized and well prepared for changes in business and technology in the future.
How much you want to complete and where you want to focus most is up to you. The engagement offers that flexibility. We leverage the tools and experience I have to offer in order to develop those deliverables that are most important to you and accelerate your ability to achieve the desired results.
Engagement Model
Business is complicated. Our consulting engagement won’t be.
I strive to keep things simple, especially technology-wise. I have a light-touch technology engagement because, as I’m sure you know, too much technology can hinder rather than help (and this comes from a technology guy). There is no need to provide onsite accommodations or technology; I provide my own hardware and software. Most of our engagement will be via a dedicated email box, which I will set up specifically for your company during our engagement, a conference bridge for teleconferencing, if required, and, when necessary or advantageous, online meetings and a collaboration workspace. There is nothing fancy here to get in the way of our focused efforts and progress.
One of the best ways for me to achieve my goal of bringing value to your company is to not become invaluable myself. I engage and mentor your people so the knowledge we bring forth, contextualize and model stays with you and your business.
You will get up to ten hours of my dedicated time each week during the consulting engagement period where we will work together to first evaluate and prioritize your needs, identify which key areas and deliverables you want to focus on first, and then lay out a plan for execution.
Also of note is that, in addition to some of the benefits outlined in subsequent sections below, this engagement being handled remotely ensures that there are no employee / contractor income tax or work visa considerations.
So what does the lifecycle of the consulting engagement look like?
Initial Contact
You start by contacting me to discuss your needs and to determine if we would be the right fit for each other. This gives me the opportunity to assess if I can offer you the right consulting engagement package for you and your company and if we would work well together; positive engagement is eighty percent of the battle.
Package Selection
Based upon our conversations, you select the consulting engagement package you would like to proceed with in terms of duration. The engagement model is the same, regardless of duration. It is up to you if you want to extend the engagement duration upfront to secure savings, or simply engage on a 3-month by 3-month basis.
Contract
You provide me with your pertinent company details, and, based upon our discussions, including start dates, etc., I complete the consulting contract for you to sign. You sign the contract and return a copy of the signed document to me.
Payment
You pay the accompanying invoice by bank wire transfer (instructions are included along with the contract and invoice in the contracts package I provide you). Payment must be received prior to the engagement start date.
Engagement Package
I will send you an engagement package confirming all of the details and provide you with technical instructions for how we will communicate, collaborate, transfer files, etc.
Discovery Session
This is where I elicit from you and your team the additional details I will need to get started on our execution plans. I provide an engagement questionnaire (included in the engagement package above) that feeds into this discovery session. It includes a list of questions to give me (and you) a better understanding of what priorities you are looking for us to achieve together.
Project / Program Initiation and Iteration Planning
Based upon the discovery session, we will identify and prioritize our scope of work and designate your liaisons for mentorship and single points of contact for each respective initiative.
Get To Work
Then, over the course of the engagement, we work together to deliver the solutions you need for your organization as discussed. I will create the desired deliverables, including models, maps and documents, in draft and send versions to your team for review as we go. This iterative method allows for learning opportunities for your company, as well as, allows for adjustments to be made throughout the creation of the deliverables.
Deliverables Handoff
I provide ongoing deliverables of our solution products while providing advice and expertise as needed up until the conclusion of the engagement.
Advantages of a Remote Engagement
- Less disruption of time-constrained subject matter experts on your team. I have structured this remote engagement in such a way as to that work can progress while respecting the valuable time of your team members. This slow burn, steady stream approach allows key people in your organization to remain adequately focused on day-to-day responsiblities while providing the requisite knowledge and effort toward completing our goals in a reasonable timeframe.
- No additional office space is required
- We try to keep the engagement simple, technology-wise
- We can limit engagement liaisons / counterparts to 1 – 3 people (who can be shifted, as needed)
- Voice-to-voice is available when required
- The expertise is absorbed by my engagement partners in your company and stays with your business. A key advantage with this engagement model is that it encourages and requires your staff to own what we develop together and retain the skills and know-how. I’m here to bring value to your company, not to become invaluable.
- To keep it simple and manage risk, your people do the hands-on work on your production systems, making them your new business experts.
- For analysis and model development, you can fire it over the wall to me and know that it is being worked on by an expert. I send the periodic results for review, on your staff’s own time, making the engagement far less disruptive than direct meetings.
- No meetings (or at least very few). I can’t tell you how many untold, expensive consulting hours are so often spent in meetings. Close teams and frequent face-to-face interactions are vital for a solid agile team experience, but invariably consultants get drawn into these additional meetings and they pack their days and pad their hours just like everyone else, only at a much higher cost. I’ve found this form of engagement to be far more effective in terms of time efficiency on both sides.
- Being handled remotely, this engagement ensures that there are no employee / contractor income tax or work visa considerations that need to be addressed. This keeps things really simple.
Consulting Engagement Packages
I am offering three different consulting engagement terms, depending upon my availability, and including discounts for longer engagement durations.
- 12 weeks of consulting during the three-month engagement
- up to 10 hours of dedicated consulting each week
- use of all tools, methods and templates (royalty free for the life of the company)
- cost: USD 36,000 for the three-month engagement
This package provides you with up to 10 hours of dedicated consulting per week for 12 weeks. Longer engagement packages offer discounts over the purchase of three-month engagements.
- 24 weeks of consulting during the six-month engagement
- up to 10 hours of dedicated consulting each week
- use of all tools, methods and templates (royalty free for the life of the company)
- cost: USD 60,000 for the six-month engagement
- savings: USD 12,000 over two three-month engagements by offering a ~17% discount
This package provides you with up to 10 hours of dedicated consulting per week for 24 weeks. This extended commitment offers a ~17% discount over purchasing two three-month engagements.
- 48 weeks of consulting during the 12-month engagement
- up to 10 hours of dedicated consulting each week
- use of all tools, methods and templates (royalty free for the life of the company)
- cost: USD 96,000 for the 12-month engagement
- savings: USD 48,000 over four three-month engagements by offering a ~33% discount
This package provides you with up to 10 hours of dedicated consulting per week for 48 weeks. This extended commitment offers a ~33% discount over purchasing four three-month engagements.
If you are interested in a consulting engagement, I would love the opportunity to discuss your needs with you further.
Please contact me below.
Engagement Terms – Simplified
Being authentic, transparent and upfront with my clients has always been a key guiding principle of mine. These items below will be covered in detail in the consulting engagement contract, which I am happy to provide for your review at any time; however, below is a simplified highlight of what you will find.
- You get me; not someone behind my name. I do not outsource my consulting engagement work.
- I won’t do anything illegal (so please don’t ask).
- Confidentiality. Your business is your business. Any information, trade secrets, unique processes, etc. that are not generally know about your company will be kept in confidence and only disclosed if required by law.
- I am here to make sure that what we choose to work on together provides value to your company. If I don’t believe it will then I will let you know (although the ultimate decision rests with you).
- I am a non-exclusive consultant. Engaging my services does not prevent me from providing consulting services to other companies during or after our engagement. Splitting my week across multiple clients is what allows me to make these engagement packages more affordable for you.
- Any tools or templates I provide to you or develop for you during the course of our engagement will be yours to use and modify freely for the life of your company, royalty free (so long as you do not try to resell them as your own).
- Engagement packages must be paid in full prior to commencement and are non-refundable once the contract is signed.
- This is a remote consulting engagement, which means that you do not need to provide me with any office space. I supply my own computer and standard software; there is no travel required; and, I engage with your company over the Internet from wherever I am to wherever you are.
- The weekly hours allotted per package are capped due to multiple client commitments; unused portions of time cannot be rolled over to the following weeks. Otherwise, this would risk conflicting with time allocated to other clients (or your time if I allowed it from another client).
- In cases where deadlines are pressing, and if I have the available capacity, additional hours can be purchased in five-hour blocks. My preference is to avoid these extenuating circumstances but I do provide the option as a failsafe; however, only if necessary and approved by both parties.
- Once you’ve purchased a package that should be it, cost-wise. Unless travel requirements or special technology use are requested by you, I will handle all of my own expenses.
- I let your people do the work on production systems, if any. If VPN (virtual private network) access is required, then you would have to provide VPN access to me of your own volition. However, production access should not be necessary as I should be able to obtain whatever I need from your staff.
About Glenn
Glenn was born and raised in Alberta, Canada, by parents who taught him about working smart and exceeding expectations. His Scandinavian heritage (ergo the spectacular last name) may be a driving force behind his exploratory leanings and nomadic heart. He evolved from ever moving city to city, house to house, to, in 2012, leaving it all behind to take his wife and three young children on an 18-month world travel adventure, which included living locally in ten different European countries. Glenn and his family are returning to this beloved pursuit, this time embarking on a year-long North American family road trip to continue the adventure and further the “world schooling” of their three children to truly appreciate the wonderful countries the United States and Canada are. Providing remote consulting services to his business clients gives them access to his experience while supporting this amazing lifestyle adventure.
Contact Me Regarding Consulting Packages
Please contact me if you are interested in purchasing a consulting engagement package and you would like to discuss it further. I am happy to arrange a discovery call to see if I can meet your business consulting needs.
Contact Instructions
Please complete the form to the left and submit your request. In your query, please also provide me with your company name, website address (to give me some background) and include any details you think would help me answer your request. Thank you.
NEXSYS Interactive Corporation
1000, 888 - 3rd ST SW Bankers Hall, West Tower Calgary, Alberta Canada T2P 5C5 +1.855.565.5511
Copyright 2018 © NEXSYS Interactive Corporation. All rights reserved.