Strategy Development and Execution

Lasting: When a strategy is created, cycles and trends need to be taken into consideration to ensure the strategy can weather and adapt to changes in the future.

Worthwhile: Strategy needs to effectively allocate resources to the fewest, most important opportunities, add value, increase performance, raise expectations internally and externally, and enhance an organization’s standing.

Agile: A robust strategy anticipates customer demands, risks, roadblocks, ambiguity, and opportunities.

Actionable: Strategy should be practical and empirical. It should be straight forward enough to convey internally and externally as well as deliver an approach that can be acted on by employees at every level.

The Clearing incorporates business and human performance improvement services into our strategy work to ensure our clients achieve their date-certain outcomes. This results in new levels of operational performance and set our clients’ organizations on a clear path to the ultimate objective.

Our performance improvement support enables quick decision-making, timely and accurate information flow, and a culture of accountability. Leaders will begin to own, track, and measure progress as well as adjust programs and behaviors along the way.

Successful transformations occur when the people impacted by the change feel supported and the organization remains mission-focused throughout the transition. During times of change, employees often feel uncertain, unclear, or fearful about the timeline, vision, and impacts on their daily work.

Our strategy consultants partner with our clients to manage the change process to look for opportunities to engage the workforce and stakeholders, communicate the “what’s at stake?” for each group impacted, design and leverage opportunities for continued process improvement through employee and stakeholder feedback mechanisms, and capture and share lessons learned. Throughout our change management consulting services, we analyze and track progress and map results against stated goals.

Our strategy and change management support ensures our clients celebrate their successes, acknowledging employee and stakeholder contributions along the way.

IT transformation efforts do not typically reach their full potential because leaders fail to consider the full range of the social or human aspects of the implementation. IT strategy design and implementation efforts must consider social elements ranging from general buy-in and adoption challenges, to training and usability. These elements, when not properly addressed, can derail an IT transformation effort.

Our strategy consultants provide the necessary change management and communication support and program and project management support during IT transformations to address the human side of change. We partner with our clients to anticipate and address the social risks, offering user-based requirements gathering, usability testing, training, communication products, and technology adoption strategies. This holistic approach addresses user concerns and enrolls them early and often in the process, resulting in the successful long-term adoption of the technology.

The Clearing’s approach to project and program management focuses on the fewest, most important initiatives that provide an organization with the best outcome for the customer and the highest growth for the organization.

Our certified project managers use best industry practices and our own methodologies to create a program structure that provides clear governance, enrollment of stakeholders, strategic communications, and risk management roles to ensure successful outcomes. Our approach aligns and builds trust among leaders and stakeholders and creates clarity on which initiatives should be tackled first. Our project managers then work with clients to drive the initiatives to successful completion.

Program risks, when not carefully anticipated, managed, and communicated, can quickly result in project derailment. The
Clearing’s approach to risk management is embedded in our strategy and program management approach.

Our strategy consultants anticipate risk, proactively build risk mitigation strategies into our program plans, and develop governance structures for escalating risk to leadership as appropriate. Our approach ensures leaders have the information they need at every point of the project to understand and manage program risks. This allows for greater decision-making ability, increased initiative support, and minimized resistance throughout a program.

The Clearing provides clients with Return on Investment (ROI) analysis that derives the net benefit of their project or initiative. Our clients have a need to measure more than their activities. They need to demonstrate that what they are undertaking has real value.

While ROI analysis is more straightforward for projects in the private sector, The Clearing’s financial experts can determine the ROI for programs or initiatives in the public and social sector, where “profit” is not the driver of an initiative. In these cases, we derive ROI based on cost savings, efficiencies, productivity, protection of classified data, and reduced real estate footprints. This analysis allows our clients to make smart decisions about the investments that will yield the best results. We package the results of ROI analysis in a visual and accessible presentation for use to brief budget managers, senior officials, and Congress.