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Many organisations consider their website as a 'shop window'. Yet many fail to deliver the benefits that would have justified the costs of creation and ongoing maintenance. There are lots of expensive websites that look good and appear, on the surface to be well implemented, yet don't achieve the hoped for results.

 

Lamberhurst believes that much of this waste is unnecessary and can be addressed. It provides business advice and analysis to businesses so that the way organisational websites contribute to the business is challenged, understood and defined well before anybody engages or manages the pure 'techies'.

 

The 'shop window', pure selling analogy has some serious shortcomings for the unwary.

 

One pitfall is the assumption that every visitor is a potential customer. Amongst the visitors may be suppliers, analysts, competitors, staff, business partners and a whole number of others who want to find information from your organisation. So you need to consider how many different and potentially contradictory purposes you want your website to try and fulfil.

 

The definition of these business reasons and the interaction that these audiences want from your organisation is a first step to understanding the navigational needs that may exist. It will also help define the sorts of content that are of relevance.

 

Another shortcoming of the shop analogy is the tendency to assume that a website should be like its physical counterpart where everyone enters and leaves through the front door ( or at least a finite number of doors ). This can be a very costly mistake and if there are numbers of different types of visitor they should probably each enter through different 'virtual doors'. Even if the visitors are of the same type their reasons for visiting and the route they took to reach your website are likely to differ e.g. word of mouth, business card, email signature, internet search. You should have different entry points to capture this fact and the much more complex entry pattern seen for websites. The path followed through the website is also likely to be enlightening, and the exit pages can be of great significance.

 

Unlike shops your website does not have requirements for evacuation and fire escapes! It is quite legitimate for there to be dead ends and sections of the website that are "walled off" from casual visitors who are of an inappropriate type, or have come by the 'wrong route'. Effective use of this can prevent visitors being distracted from the purpose they originally came for, and which you want them to fulfil.

 

Does your website form part of a viable process?

It is important to consider whether a website and other electronic or traditional mechanisms contribute to an overall process which grab the attention of visitors, and then encourages familiarity with your organisation through information and experience until a trusted relationship is reached where it 'feels right' to consider transacting business between the two parties. Using business process analysis can help define the content and interaction that is appropriate at each stage of the process and the role of your website. It also ensures that the website is considered within the context of the total business activity.

 

Driving traffic to the website

Once the business purposes of the website have been defined is then much easier to define those approaches that will assist in driving more appropriate traffic to the website. It is also much easier to know what the relevant measurements and criteria for success and failure are, rather than engaging in a futile battle to optimise and understand everything.

 

If you want your business to leverage Internet technologies more effectively within your overall operation then talk to us.

 

These are common symptoms of something that needs some pro-active change: reappraising, considering your goals, how are your resources being used, could they be directed more effectively? All of these will be happening already somewhere within your management processes… so why isn’t it working?

 

It can be very difficult to take a step outside the day-to-day pressures of the current operation that’s meeting the current needs just to take a fresh look at an old issue. Often the fix that solves the current immediate need is taken but the plan to get to the longer-term deeper solution gets overtaken by the next immediate need.

 

What can you do about achieving solutions that get to the bottom of things and release your organisations efforts to achieve your goals rather than continually fixing old issues?

 

At Lamberhurst Corporation we will provide you with “step out” support for your change. We are pragmatic business people who have held senior and executive positions in UK and International businesses. We have substantial experience in enabling growth and change using industry standard project management processes to ensure high quality outcomes. We can bring our experience to bear in forging your new change programme or help existing change programmes regain momentum.

 

Using our Business Practitioners’ extensive experience in Organisation and Process change we will help you to re-examine what you do and how you do it to diagnose what the new change needs to be. We will:

 

A critical element of any change process is the support from people who believe in the change. Finding which aspects of the change are valued and why can be an important step in developing this support. Understanding all the key stakeholder perspectives is also required to ensure the change lasts beyond the immediate work.

 

Once a change has been put in place a support structure is required to ensure that what was yesterday’s change becomes tomorrow’s base operation. This often involves changes in roles and responsibilities, review processes, some form of governance and new accountabilities.

 

We are a national organisation and have sufficient resources for any project and its resulting work streams. We are focussed on return on investment and deliver workable practical solutions for implementation in the workplace. Using our experienced Business Practitioners we will take you through the process outlined above of Re-appraisal, Solution Development, Support generation and Embedding the Change. We will establish where the value lies for your organisation and provide the support for your own organisation to carry this change through to completion.

 

Charles Darwin

Lamberhurst Corporation – We are business people like you bringing senior and executive experience, providing a pragmatic service, using well-developed methodologies, and delivering practical solutions for implementation in the workplace.

 

 

Mary Jean LeTendre

 

Many businesses are not in exciting new growth-markets. Rather, they are steady, their technology changes slowly, they don’t get much publicity, and profit margins are slim and unchanging. Yet managers are trained today to be dynamic, change-minded, shoot-for-growth, risk-takers. That doesn’t fit with the reality. Instead, cautiously milking the cash cow is the sensible strategy. 

If this describes your business, here is a selection of techniques for protecting your earnings flow and preserving your markets:

 

In static markets, companies tend to become very similar to each other. Other companies will be examining yours to copy your best practices and you should be doing the same. Competitor Analysis is the main method of choice. Any differences detected indicate strongly-probable areas for improvement. Competitor analysis also informs you of the range of options for meeting the same market need.      

Steady earnings depend on a stable business in which risks are minimised. That is a truism, but have you analysed your business to find what are the most likely destabilising events - not catastrophes, but quite-likely events that will pare your profits? You may have, but if so have you put monetary values on them and evaluated the probability of the events so you can calculate how much to spend in avoiding those risks? This type of RE survey also enables you to more accurately predict your future earnings.

It is in the interests of the players in a static market to maintain the status quo - if everyone keeps the same share then overall the profits will be much higher than if there is cutthroat price-cutting for market share. Do you know where the line between tacit collusion and reasonable inertia falls? Clearly, this is a very delicate area, fraught with legal issues, but in the real world most static markets work like this. It is wise to ensure that senior staff are familiar not only with competition law pitfalls but also what can legitimately be done.

How do you respond to a competitor that attacks your core market? Do you price-cut to maintain market share? Do you retaliate in their core market? Do you react immediately or wait and see? Game-theoreticians have modelled these and many other possible solutions, by running computer simulations where responses like “tit-for-tat” are tested against alternatives. The merits of each type of strategy are well understood and are relevant to real-world business. Similar strategies can be used in other areas, such as during the negotiation of contracts.

Preserving your markets includes making it hard for new competitors to enter them. There is a host of methods that can quite properly be used - not only intellectual property rights but also customer loyalty schemes, sectoral quality certification schemes, etc., and they all need professional advice in order not to fall foul of the law.

Cost reduction is a type of programme usually associated with underperformance and crisis, but is also valuable to stable businesses. In a market where the technology is not changing, price is king and cost reductions are the principal way to maintain competitiveness. Using a gradual cost-cutting programme avoids disruption and adverse employee reaction.

Finally, of course, it all comes down to having a satisfied customer. Most organisations carry out surveys of their customers and adjust their activities to the responses, but it is often largely lip service to ISO 9000. Modern methods enhance not only the number of responses received but also the quality of those responses and the range of constructive suggestions that customers make.

 

 

 

 

 

One of the greatest challenges faced by organisations in a highly competitive and fluid environment is how to define and communicate overall purpose in a way that will inspire commitment, invite participation and mobilise people to attain clearly defined and strategically aligned performance targets. The mere existence of a motivational mission statement is not enough. Even the best-formulated strategy documents often gather dust in the filing cabinets of decision makers.

 

Successful organisational leaders realise that the formulation, communication and implementation of strategy is not an automatic process. The vision, goals and values of the organisation need to be shared and real to the extent that they influence people’s decision-making, focus their energy and effort and optimise individual performance. Optimal organisational performance is dependent on the degree to which shared values and agreed upon strategy direct people’s behaviour and performance in the workplace on a daily basis.

The Compass Aligned Performance System (c@ps) bridges the gap between conceptualisation and implementation by providing organisations with a process that facilitates the creation, distillation and cascading of strategy down to all levels of the organisation. The c@ps process enables organisations to crystallise, articulate, communicate and obtain buy-in to the overall purpose and strategy. It encourages participation and ownership of shared organisational objectives aligned to specific measurements. 

 

The c@ps process is a simple, yet comprehensive strategy distillation process that is tailored to the specific needs and priorities of each organization and can be implemented at any level in the organization. The process could start at top management level where time is spent in collaborative workshops on scanning environmental and market potential and evaluating organisational capabilities and development areas. The vision and overall direction are formulated/reviewed with a long-term view in mind. Critical Success Factors (or, in a balanced scorecard context, “destination / end view statements”) are formulated. Key Measures or Performance Indicators are set at a very high level in order to define criteria for overall organisational performance. The next phase of the process includes the identification of specific tactics and actions with clear measures at departmental level. From this point onwards, the process focuses on cascading and translating strategy down into the organisation. Team workshops allow people to enrol in the vision; define best practices and individual performance criteria with development objectives and ensure buy-in and implementation. The key to success lies in the simple, uniform and highly visual format of the cascading process that creates a shared language and common goals and enables a “direct line of sight” between individual targets and overall strategy.

 

 

If you want your organisation to become highly effective in the execution of the critical objectives in the business, talk to us

Project management is not a “do once and leave it” activity. To be effective it must be applied in a consistent and continuous fashion. For every organisation the time comes when there is the “new approach” or the “bigger project”. Adding support to the internal team in a constructive manner can be one of the most effective ways of ensuring final success. The challenge is often to identify the correct support and deliver it in a way that does not undermine the internal team.

 

 

The project management practice within Lamberhurst has professionals with the experience to mentor an organisations internal team. The formal qualifications are a given but it is the experience that sets the team apart. All of the group have held senior executive positions as well as having delivered significant projects. This combination of commercial and management experience allows the team to support your team from “their side of the table”. No one at Lamberhurst needs to prove him or herself; their only motivation is the success of your project.

 

We have adopted Prince2 as the core approach as it provides both a formal framework and the option to tailor any element to match the scale and scope of the project. Pragmatic is a word often used within Lamberhurst and it is the backbone of our approach to project management. With our team having come from a true commercial background you can be assured that the support we provide will be focused on the commercial goals of your project.

 

Where your staff can benefit from extended mentoring the project management team are able to call upon the extensive people skills available within the network. We believe that for the most effective mentoring, or indeed any aspect of project management, domain knowledge can provide the added value that can ensure a successful outcome. Here again the breadth of experience within the network can work to your advantage.

 

Lamberhurst can provide the skills, and understanding, that can only come from having first hand experience of the sorts of problems that can beset even the best conceived project. It is our goal to provide this in a structured mentored offering whose only goal is to ensure your success.

 

·         Underestimate the resources, costs and timescales required

 

 

 

 

Evaluate using the SCIROCCO process: