Long-term partnerships with clients depend on bringing reliable value. As budgets tighten and with many long-term projects on-hold, finding ways to demonstrate that value becomes more important.
Over the 20 years+ that De-RISK has operated, we have helped many strategic partners (eg large management consultancies) to develop longer and richer partnerships by bringing a reliability to programme success alongside insights into other areas of the programme that can benefit from support.
Our Strategic Delivery Assurance (SDA) methodology has a multiplying effect, opening doors to new and varied opportunities and ultimately new engagements.
It starts with reassurance – with rigor and speed – to deliver a critical programme for the end-client
When, for example, strategic partners are brought in as delivery partners to help deliver projects or programmes that are strategically important to the client, they are looking for the assurances and rigour that SDA brings.
PA Consulting needed to accurately predict timescales for Cargo Logic Air’s move from Stansted to Heathrow, they used SDA methodology which showed that they had a 0% chance of hitting the required milestone (in fact, SDA revealed a 3-month delay to the transition which could result in the subsequent loss of CAA licence – a catastrophic outcome.). As a result, PA Consulting was able to help senior managers develop a different strategy and an alternative plan, based on retaining key staff and developing a more phased recruitment programme, which ultimately resulted in an early transition. Read more here.
SDA cuts through complexity to bring insight and predictability to programmes. Then it adds more value by revealing other ‘door opening’ opportunities to support the end-client in their aims.
This value comes about as a result of SDA’s rigorous actions plans to manage the assumptions being made which can reveal linked areas of the business that need additional support or expertise the client does not possess in house.
In the case of Qatar Ports, working alongside PA Consulting, SDA again established that the initial go-live milestone to build a major international sea-port was likely to be missed by four months. More worryingly, the analysis showed that there was, in any event, a 0% chance of meeting the dates and even if they managed all the identified risks, they would only recover approximately two months of the delay. As a result this positioned PA Consulting to facilitate a series of short, focused, workshops where elements of the programme were restructured, re-designed or down-scoped to ensure that (at least) the minimum objectives were met by the required milestone date. Read the case study here.
Working with consultants Kearney, our SDA methodology was used to do a short one-week assessment of a bank post merger integration programme which directly led to a $22m account for the strategic partner over the next 2 years. Read the case study here.
“Action plans to manage risky assumptions will inevitably require expertise that the client does not possess and therefore the strategic partners will be asked to propose additional effort to help. This is the “engagement-multiplier” ie for a relatively small cost of using SDA, the strategic partner will open new doors with the client and thus gain significant new business.” Keith Baxter, De-RISK Managing Director
The value of long-term client relationships built on reliability as a delivery partner, as well as added value from challenge and constructive insights cannot be underestimated, particularly during periods of instability and economic hardship. When client programmes are under stress, providing the ROI and additional benefits of consultant help is even more important.
The strategic partners we work with have relied on SDA to bring:
- Process rigour to identify the real risks and opportunities before they embark on a complex programme journey
- A breath of new life into stalling engagements where the true risks are hidden and the value that the strategic partner is bringing is not clear to the end-client.
New business opportunities as the risks and opportunities identified lead to new potential projects/engagements for the strategic partner.
The benefits continue long after the SDA has been undertaken with end-clients frequently requesting SDA’s on new programmes without the strategic partner pushing for it. This, of course, creates a “double whammy” for strategic partners who typically win even more business on the back of the analysis.