Our client is one of the largest global shared services organisations in India supporting a leading UK retailer. The business serves millions of customers and 450,000 colleagues worldwide everyday through a best-in-class business services model using modern-day retail technologies.
As the client was drawing a close to its 2023 strategy, the Senior Executive asked Konvergent to support with the next 3-year strategy cycle.
Konvergent’s involvement came at a time when alignment of the functional units, the senior executive’s vision and goals was critical. Through a series of interviews, Konvergent were required to extract, review and analyse each unit’s strategic priorities, visions, challenges, pain points and successes to understand if the direction aligns with the CEO’s vision.
A major challenge was the tight timeframe for completion – Konvergent had just under 3 weeks to conduct 1st and 2nd round interviews with the functional leads, creating a tangible set of artefacts that would enable the senior leadership to focus on strategic decisions during a 3-day strategy workshop in India, rather than spending time understanding the individual priorities of the broader leadership team.
Konvergent had to work in an agile manner in a fast-paced environment covering diverse geographical locations; India, Ireland, UK and Central Europe with a quick turnaround, relaying and story-telling for an audience with a different native language.
The first phase was stakeholder engagement and strategy discovery, with the aim to interview each stakeholder at least once. It was quickly identified that common themes and repeated challenges were being faced across the business. With continuous playback in a consistent, clear, simple language and structure enabled Konvergent to summarise & articulate a Why/What/How/Outcome deliverable.
The second phase involved the facilitation of the offsite workshops at the clients’ offices in India. Using the artefacts from the first phase, each business unit were able to present their view with strategic priorities and pain points. Decisions could then be made to gain a consensus across the business units and Senior Executives to plan for the strategy cycle.
During the final phase Konvergent had 2 weeks to consolidate the outputs from phase 2 and produce a Year-0 roadmap. The business functions were divided into 3 areas, each headed by 2 senior leaders. Having to work remotely, interviews with these stakeholders, Konvergent compiled a roadmap consisting of manageable quick win projects to close the current strategy. In parallel to this, a ‘Strategy on a Page’ was produced aligning the collective organisation and the wider group.
During this 6-week engagement, a team was quickly assembled, worked closely with the stakeholders with the following outcomes:
In strategy and architecture, an often-neglected aspect is the Return on Investment (ROI). As financial professionals demand concrete figures when considering investments, more than a mere mention of process improvement or technology optimisation may be required. In their eyes, such endeavours represent costs, making it challenging to secure the necessary funding. Considering this, it is crucial to demonstrate ROI, regardless of how impressive a project’s visual outputs may be. How did Konvergent do this on this project?
“Value is a number, everything else is noise”
Some of the quick wins that Konvergent identified were for correct project priotisation. There was an element of confusion on how to correctly prioritise across the 11 different business units that made up the shared services centre.
By reordering around 25 different initiatives on the roadmap, including “killing” 5 projects that were not required, Konvergent delivered an ROI of around £400,000, circa 6 times ROI.
Konvergent,
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T: +44 (0)20 3744 1256
E: info@konvergent.co.uk
