Illustrative portfolio of capabilities
We help teams work up the analysis curve, moving from more tactical and reactive views of performance to higher-value, strategic insight. We have deep expertise in working with data across the product life-cycle and throughout different functional organizations.
We blend robust Continuous Improvement methodologies with data analysis to identify solutions for your business.
We believe in working up and down different levels of abstraction. By starting at a high level, we ensure good alignment with leadership. We focus on what matters. Once we can articulate the challenge, we dig in looking for more and more focused performance measures. At some point, the data system runs out of granularity, and we move back into the real world with our objective evidence. This approach provides a quantifiable path between top level problem and solution, while ensuring we consider the people, processes, and data throughout.
Here’s an example of a business decomposition we created for a client. This particular business delivers value to multiple customers through a series of individually managed projects loosely aligned into a portfolio. At any time some projects are large in scale, and some are small. Due to their independent nature, each project is individually planned, and each can perform better or worse than planned in several broad categories: Labor, Material, Intra-company, and Other.
We started by extracting data from the financial system so we could understand which projects contributed the most to the business’ overall performance (left panel). Then, we compared each projects’ current and projected performance against their plans (right panel). To paraphrase Orwell, “All projects are equal. Some projects are more equal than others.” Now, we can objectively see where efforts should be focused, not just at the project level, down to the specific cost type. When we engage with specific project teams, we can highlight lagging performance areas and offer laser-focused support.
Once we identify a specific project to support, we can work with stakeholders to address shortcomings in cost, schedule, or throughput.