Case Study - Giving Edge to Your Organisation's Strategy

The xpand-pro approach:

The xpand-pro approach consisted of a 7 step strategy. An xpand-pro senior consultant with experience in similar processes within international organisations, as well as with smaller and medium-sized businesses in the profit and non-profit sectors, acted as moderator for the strategy development process.
 
- the mission statement was described. What does the company offer for today; to whom and to meet which needs?
 
- the vision as a dream and big future picture was elaborated. Every management team member wrote down the 3 most important goals to be achieved in the qualitative and/or quantitative area, making a differentiation between internal and external objectives.
 
- the customer needs in terms of hard facts (like price & quality) and emotional factors (like reliability) were listed. These were checked against the products and services the company offered, resulting in the creation of a matrix. A further refining of this question involved the writing down of customer needs which were not currently being met (as a chance for future development) as well as the transparency of products and services which were being offered, but which no longer actually met any customer needs in a significant way. In closing this part of the process, the USP's of the company, expressed from the customer's perspective, were stated.
 
- a thorough SWOT-analysis was created. The perception of internal strengths and weaknesses was collected and clustered. The same was done for the external opportunities and threats - linked to the expected trends in the political, technical, and financial areas of society, and other relevant environments.
 
- competitor situation was investigated by looking at the questions: Who were the main competitors for the different areas in which this company is active? What were they known for? How were they positioned, compared to the strengths of this company? How good were they at fulfilling the needs of the cstomer? As a result the main strategic strengths of the company became visible, which was a first step in the creation of a business development process.
 
- strategic objectives were discussed and defined, taking into account the vision, customer needs, SWOT and the competitor situation. They were broken down to an operational level, each step being fixed to a time line. These action plans were allocated to a project-leader and a final time line for completion was drawn up.
 
- the way of communicating the results to the employees was determined, including the method of follow-up on the commitments and corresponding data as well as defining the managers in charge.

The outcome of the process was satisfaction within the management team, who now had the feeling that they were investing their energy in a useful way; not just working at the coalface constantly but being able to step back to see and tackle the bigger picture. Besides, the process not only initiated new ideas, but also revealed the status quo in a transparent and structured way.

This enabled discussions on pending issues and the clarification of decisions to take place.