Business Change Management
From a ‘Digital Transformation’ to a refinement and streamlining of processes and procedures, we can enhance the efficiency of your business to achieve more optimal delivery, making you more competitive and increasing margins.
The Scenario
All construction businesses have a beginning. In most cases, they start from nothing. Maybe one or two individuals, some plant and that all important first client. Over time, the business grows. As the number, size and value of projects increase, so does the companies turnover. More people are employed. More plant is purchased. There is a need for a separate accounts team, a separate operations team, a separate surveying team.
At some point, the way things were done in the past is no longer adequate for the present, and the way things will be done in the future. We don’t mean the physical delivery of your construction works on site (although that too will change with time). What we refer to is the system on which your business is based. How do you estimate a project? How do you control for quality? How do you brief your operations team? How do you control budgets and mitigate risk?
It is inevitable that with growth comes complexity. More documents. More invoices. More risks. An organisations ability to handle this complexity while going through a period of growth depends on the robustness and capacity of the system on which they organise their business process. Your first project may have been estimated on the cliched ‘back of an envelope’, but at some point in your business growth there was no doubt some progression to a more sophisticated method. How are you doing things today? Is it the most optimal solution? Are your estimates quality controlled, accurate, undertaken as efficiently as possible? Do you need to change the way you do things?
The mistake many companies make is thinking that if they simply purchase the latest document management software or digital estimating package, they’ll be ready for the future. It’s true that new software is a necessary component of a business’s growth. However, it’s far from a case of taking it out of the box, plugging it in and watching your margins increase.
In the face of constant evolution and progress, change in the way things are done is necessary and essential for any business that wants to remain competitive and maintain or grow their market share. Your competitors – at least your good competitors – acknowledge this.
Those with the most efficient system of organising and managing their business can achieve the lowest costs, enabling them to increase margins or offer lower prices to their customers and increase market share.
You may be reading this as a market leader, with a system that works for you. You’ve been through a process of refinement and optimisation and you’re confident that you have a strong foundation to maintain competitive and grow in the coming years. If that’s the case, you don’t need our services.
On the other hand, you may be questioning whether you need to change? What to change? How to change? Do you need to overhaul your entire business process, or simply tweak a few lines of communication and introduce a few new quality control checkpoints?
We frequently come across companies that know something is broken. However, the demands of clients and keeping up with the businesses core delivery always takes priority. We’ve been there. You have multiple live sites. Staff to manage. Disputes to resolve. New work to secure. Your time is taken up working in the business, rather than on the business. There’s no time to take a step back and review how things are working. This is where we can help.
The Solution
There’s no one size fits all approach. No standard solution. All construction companies are different, but at their core they are ultimately organisations that take inputs, process them, and produce an output. The aim is to sell the output for more than the cost of the input, achieving a margin. A rough outline of our business enhancement process is below:
- Understanding
With the benefit of a fresh set of eyes and as an outside observer, we can engage with you at all levels of the business from board level to senior management to operatives on the work-face to first of all understand how you currently do things. Change has a baseline, and that’s the status quo.
- Identification
Once we understand the business, we model the component parts of its organisation. We identify existing workflows, and any bottlenecks or points of failure. We identify lines of communication and how information is transferred. We look at the documents you produce and the reasons for producing them. We identify duplication of effort.
- Proposals
After understanding the business and identifying where change is needed, we put-forward proposals that can lead to increased efficiency. Do you need to restructure your existing departmental functions. Add or reduce middle management? Introduce some new software? We detail the benefits of individual changes and set out a comprehensive plan to achieve a holistic upgrade of your business systems.
- Change Management
At this point, your business starts to change. We can provide guidance on how to enact change, from getting the buy-in of key team members, to making the switch from one system to another. What we do will depend on the scope of change required and the strength and capacity of your current management team.
- Feedback
After change has been implemented, we monitor how this has been received by your team. Has it led to improved efficiency? Higher staff moral? An increase in the volume and quality of your tenders? Better management of project risks?
What can we do for you?
We can work with you in an advisory role to deliver change in your business process and procedures to improve your efficiency.
Contact Us Today to Discuss Your Requirements