Purpose Led

Business Transformation through Applied Insights

 Background & Context

Global financial institutions plod through their annual ritual for budget planning that begins with canvassing for initiatives from stakeholders spread across their lines of business in various geographies. This usually begins around August of every calendar year and gathers steam in October and November. It is also around this time that many leaders “find money” that would need to be spent by the end of the calendar year, if not for any reason, but to get, at the bare minimum “flat” budget allocations for the next calendar year. In the worst case, business leaders realize that they may come up short on their calendar year commitments, sometimes by orders of magnitude, thereby creating a “backlog” for the next calendar year. The Macroplan 2140 platform is underpinned by a nimble methodology comprising taxonomy, process and templates, that distill, encapsulate and codify more than four decades of global experience, to address critical gaps in an organization’s business planning process.

Organizations create business plans as a guide to develop a roadmap for their business. A business plan also serves as a useful artifact for senior executives to communicate the organization’s goals to their employees and to measure the performance of their business. As businesses mature, the planning process assumes an urgency and priority that few businesses are ready for, especially if their prevailing processes are a better version of “shooting from the hip” and making decisions “from the gut”. The urgency for a nimble structure and process also stems from the need to allocate best available resources to the most impactful initiatives, as well as to scale and capture new business opportunities.

Our Clients

The Platform specifically caters to small and medium sized businesses that are poised to scale, aspire to solidify their global footprint and are willing  to change their business planning paradigm. An ideal client to realize materially significant outcomes in Year 1 of adopting this System, would be an  organization having the following characteristics:

In business for > 2 years

< $100M annual revenues

50 – 300 employees

Beachheads in global locations

These organizations are often constrained by their ability to deploy their best resources for maximum business impact and more importantly, to effectively scale their scarce executive resources. Organizations that are flush with budgets to address backlogs and to fund large, multi-year initiatives are facing  resource shortages to be able to execute on them.

Despite consuming excess of 3,000 hours from multiple senior executives, usually in Q4 of every fiscal year, the resulting business plans are not representative of an organization’s ability to meet the intended objectives, assuming they are clearly articulated to begin with.

Business planning needs to migrate from an organization’s backwaters of spreadsheets, static presentations, and limited analytics, to 21st century methods and tools.

Why Now?

Technology advances enable businesses to scale more efficiently. However, building software on distributed infrastructure has become more complex; necessitating robust plans and optimal deployment of specialized expertise, while allowing for flexible adjustments and course corrections.

The confluence of technology, available budgets and opportunities to deploy scarce resources to strategic initiatives opens new windows to prepare the organization better in the 21st century.

Macroplan 2140™ distills, encapsulates and codifies four decades of global experience into an web based business planning platform, to deliver business plans that improve the chances of meeting the organizations business objectives, every year. The platform is underpinned by a framework of robust taxonomy and real time workflow, uniformly applicable across all departments, markets, and geographies, with built-in flexibility to retain their unique characteristics.

Industry practice

Growth oriented companies aspire to offer innovative products and services to ever expanding client segments and markets. The strategic intent is to repurpose, optimize and scale the foundational capabilities i.e., platforms and operational infrastructure, to be able to offer new products and services at speed. The operating premise is to defend high-value components of the franchise and to continue to meet non-discretionary risk & regulatory compliance objectives.

Yearly business plans typically consist of scope objectives for a number of activities and tasks that may be organized in various ways, which in reality represent projects, across lines of business.These plans are based on Activities, Resources and Allocated Capacity. Usually, these activities do not reveal the correlation between results achieved at the end of the year vis-à-vis the original objectives. At the same time, people across the organization are busy and fully allocated across all the activities. Effort tracking takes lower priority, if not an afterthought, implying the need to estimate effort up front and monitor burn rate during the project. In the worst case, resource priority conflicts and over ambitious objectives may result in excessive over time, burn-out, unmet expectations, wasted investments and missed opportunities.

Critical gaps and improvement opportunities:

1

Normalization of Project definitions across departments

Quantification of business impact in the plan

3

Decision framework to prioritize Initiatives

4

Effort estimation and alignment of project staffing needs by Expertise

5

Measures for Product or Service Quality and Rework

Protocols for Issue Management & Escalation

7

Measures and Process to manage employee morale

Proposed Actions

Leading organizations in the global Capital Markets industry continue to invest in transformational programs and technology initiatives to be able to operate with agility and to roll out products and services in anticipation of client demand. These investments are in response to the rapid pace of technology innovations around them, threat to their prevailing business models from nimble non-traditional competitors, commoditization of some of their services and changing demographics, as much as they are related to simplifying their legacy infrastructure and operating models.

The transformation programs are underpinned by a common Purpose and are measured on Value delivered to their key stakeholders. The programs are designed for the enterprise to remain nimble, generate insights and to be able to ride the waves of the industry’s innovation trajectory.

  • The prevailing sentiment is that the firm’s Purpose more aptly defines their lofty aspirations and supports an enduring Vision, organization Culture and return on Human Capital investments.

    o Yearly goals represent incremental progress e.g., Stakeholder value delivered and business impact, towards achieving the organization’s Purpose

    o Stakeholders, in addition to Shareholders, Clients and Employees, are inclusive of Community, Region and the World at large (e.g., ESG initiatives)

2. Align cross functional Initiatives and Priorities with the organization’s Purpose and Vision

3. Normalize planning methodology and taxonomy across Segments and Departments

4. Formalize decision framework to prioritize Initiative funding

5. Formalize effort estimating model

  • Programs are

    o cross functional

    o aligned to goals, potentially spanning multiple calendar years

    o governed by a charter, having clear objectives and outcomes

  • Minimally,

    o Plan with Workstreams, Milestones and Deliverables (work products)

    o Estimated effort, Skills, Roles and Resource alignment

    o Effort tracking and reporting

    o Communication protocol and cadence