The Business Transformation Process

A business transformation programme is an enterprise-wide initiative for a major change, initiated by the CEO and the Group Executive Committee. It typically covers a span of 1-3 years, and requires translation on different management levels. It often involves a major culture change.

MCE helps you to achieve your business transformation and strategy implementation through your people. MCE works together with you to clarify the strategy, translate it into aligned goals, build a strategy implementation plan with a programme/project portfolio, develop monitoring mechanisms, etc. We bring our entire range of services to your assistance to achieve these.

MCE Senior Associates have had extensive experience with leading business transformation and new strategy implementation over the course of their careers. With their own experience and the MCE range of services, capabilities and tools, they co-design a plan with you to help achieve your business transformation and implementation of strategy. The focus is always around your strategy, the key performance measures you want to impact, and the changes it requires. From there we partner with you to design a plan that makes sense given your goals, context and culture.

There are 10 steps to business transformation that must be addressed in order for your strategy to be fully implemented. For each step, we give you some examples of how we help you. This is fully customizable to your context.

STEP 1: Clarifying the Strategy’s Impact on Each Part of the Organization and Planning the Change

A business strategy sets goals and defines the customer value proposition and delivery. But often the changes in the business model are not clear or perceived as urgent. It is not obvious what behaviour is expected from your managers.

Transformation is a complex process covering 18 to 36 months. The involvement and commitment of all management levels in the company is a prerequisite. To make a strategy change really happen, we recommend you to put in place a dedicated programme structure next to the current organization.

Your top and senior management should create a sense of urgency, an understanding that the change is needed now. We help you analyze and select the quick wins that can build trust and credibility throughout your company.

Strategy clarification and implementation planning workshop 

MCE helps you clarify your strategy, identify the key changes needed and plan an effective company-wide Business Transformation Programme with your top management during a 1½ day workshop. 

STEP 2: Communicating and Engaging into the Change Vision

Business transformation calls for a tailored and timely top-down and bottom-up communication with all internal and external stakeholders. We ensure that your communication is sustained, noting progress and calling for increased participation.

Designing the strategy communication plan
MCE helps you to design a solid strategy communication plan. The message will be tailored to different audiences so that everyone gains a deep understanding of what the strategic goals are, what your target market is, what your value proposition is, what actions will lead to the strategy realisation and what will be everybody’s internal role in it.

Collecting and integrating feedback
MCE supports you in involving line management to communicate the strategic goals throughout the organization. We counsel you on how to engage staff in the strategy translation and gather meaningful feedback from deep within your company.

Making better use of communication tools and technologies
MCE advises you on how to make a better use of existing and new internal communication tools and technologies. With social-casting and micro-blogging a real-time collaborative community can be built to engage employees across your company.

Personal communication coaching for the C-level
MCE provides your CEO and senior staff with a personal communication coach where needed. 

STEP 3: Selecting the Right Metrics

Without putting the right metrics in place, any strategic change will fail. Therefore, we will decide with you how corporate and business KPIs can to be aligned horizontally and vertically within the company.

Defining and aligning the key metrics
MCE is experienced in identifying your key metrics. Starting from your vision and strategic goals we determine with you the long- and short-term drivers, the measures and targets for financial growth, customer intimacy, operational excellence and staff engagement. We identify the leading indicators that drive the change. We help you communicate these down to different divisions and departments—working with the heads of those departments—to build metrics for their area that are aligned with the overall key performance indicators.

Aligning metrics and appraisal/evaluation measures
MCE supports your HR department to align HR metrics with the company’s key performance measures. 

STEP 4: Aligning Performance Appraisal and Reward System

Determining the right evaluation criteria and motivators for different employee groups is essential for delivering on your strategic goals. We help you to bridge HR and line management.

Integrating HR systems and line managers’ needs
MCE identifies with you what motivates different groups of employees to deliver and outperform on the strategic goals. We help you to integrate HR performance appraisal & reward systems with line managers’ needs. 

STEP 5: Building Coalitions

Identification of the allies with both the power and the potential for cross-functional teamwork is a major imperative for successful business transformation. We can ensure that the guiding coalition is properly represented in task forces and steering committees to drive the change at each level. Your coalition of change agents has a major impact in the success or failure of your Business Transformation Programme, and on the extent of potential unwanted side-risks, such as resistance and disbelief.

Identifying change agents 

MCE helps you to identify who the changes agents in your company are. We advise you on which role they can take up to ensure that there is enough commitment, focus and energy present in the company.  

STEP 6: Defining the Talent Gap

When leaders and managers are not equipped with the needed capabilities to deliver on their strategic goals, you will lose momentum, belief and focus. We help you to close the talent gap.

Executive team development
Compelling forces hold executive teams captive in their current thinking. MCE helps your Executive Team to shift the practices, rituals and relationships so that change can really happen.

Executive mentoring and business coaching
Result-oriented individual mentoring and coaching helps your senior managers to gain vision, strategic insight and develop their leadership skills. It helps them see the way to executive performance.

Job competency models and talent audit
MCE supports your company with defining the company-wide and function-specific competences needed to implement your strategy. We select for you the best tools from our different solutions partners.

Development of capabilities of managers
MCE helps you to further develop the capabilities of your individual managers and teams of managers with leadership, functional or cross-functional internal and individually focused workshops. 

STEP 7: Building Capabilities for Process Redesign

To build further on the success of early achievements, we support you in embedding the change in the organisation. Processes must be re-aligned with the strategy and re-thought from an end-to-end perspective. They should contribute to your chosen value discipline: customer intimacy, product leadership or operational excellence. This requires from your managers a lateral cross-functional thinking and capabilities in process management.

Building capabilities to redesign processes
MCE provides your teams with the tools and capabilities to audit your processes, to define the needed improvements and to come up with actions for business process improvement. 

STEP 8: Aligning Leadership Behaviour with the Strategy

The way leaders behave and set examples enables and motivates people. If they continue business as usual, why then should people change? It is important to get leaders on board with the strategy, so that they ensure the leadership model and encourage the behaviour expected from their people.

Leadership development programmes
MCE can conduct a series of leadership programmes for your managers in groups of 12-15. This starts with the top leaders because their decisions and behaviours set the context for everyone else. The first part of the programme is a workshop about the MCE Change Leadership Model – strategy, metrics, customer metrics, processes and key projects to implement the strategy. Participants learn to articulate strategic plans in a clear way to people. The second part of the programme is a workshop where project progress, key points learned and observations about implementation are shared.

One-to-one coaching
The leadership training is followed by a period of on-the-job implementation of business projects, with possible one-to-one coaching at set intervals. 

STEP 9: Building the Culture that Supports the Strategy

In any change programme culture cannot be changed immediately. Culture change happens through diligent and concerted effort at the above steps. It takes a year or so before real changes can be seen. And it takes about three to five years to completely shift the culture, depending on how well the above is implemented.

Measuring the Alignment of People (MAP)
MCE’s MAP methodology measures how groups of people understand what the new strategy is, as well as how they perceive the current state of change. The data can be sorted by any number of criteria – by location, by management level, by department. Measurements can be done at the start of the business transformation and at pre-determined intervals so that the progress can be measured. 

STEP 10: Monitoring the Progress of Strategy Implementation

A Business Transformation Programme should have specific programme KPIs. We recommend monitoring the progress quarterly, while integrating the lessons learned and insights collected throughout the Business Transformation Programme. In some cases we help the customer in putting in place a dedicated Transformation Monitoring Committee(s) structure.

Putting in place a monitoring mechanism 

MCE helps you to define specific quantitative and qualitative indicators and to put into place appropriate monitoring and evaluation processes. Our MCE Senior Associates can take part in performance checkpoint meetings and advise you on corrective actions.