Setting a new and ambitious strategic direction
Our client – a global supply chain logistics company – is one of the world’s most sustainable logistics businesses, operating through a global network of more than 750 service centres across more than 60 countries.
They had recently embarked on the delivery of an ambitious and far-reaching corporate strategy. The aim was to drive out significant operational efficiencies and strengthen competitive advantage, through new and innovative logistics solutions.
Creating and sustaining the conditions for strategic success
The organisation had successfully embedded strong governance and tooling to structure and oversee its pipeline of transformation initiatives. However, success in delivering on their strategy relied on strong, capable transformation leadership throughout the business which, in turn, relied on strong, well-embedded transformation knowledge and know-how.
Berkeley’s significant experience in this space, combined with a strong track record of delivery in other high-profile programmes with the client, led the company to ask us for help. We partnered together to define and develop the knowledge solutions needed to create and sustain the conditions for success.
Building the transformation capability required to realise the ambition
As a first step, we engaged people from across the global business to build an understanding of current capabilities and need. Based on this, we recommended the development of an interactive Transformation Playbook. This would provide engaging, practical and ‘bite-sized’ transformation guidance to business leaders throughout the organisation, as well as signposts to help, support and subject matter expertise where needed.
Having agreed the concept and design, we went on to develop the Playbook alongside a wide variety of key stakeholders. We did this through a series of sprints, with each sprint focused on a specific part of the transformation journey.
A guide for every stage of the transformation journey
The finished Playbook provided an end-to-end transformation guide for business leaders, covering:
- Ideation: How to set clear objectives and metrics, identify and prioritise business opportunities, and create new and compelling transformation ideas
- Validation: How to assess viability and feasibility, and identify/select alternative solution options for each idea
- Definition: How to define selected business transformation ideas and solutions in more depth, and secure agreement to proceed and then prepare for implementation
- Implementation: How to deliver and embed the change with maximum speed-to-value and minimum deployment risk
- Realisation: How to fully realise benefits following implementation and establish ongoing continuous improvement
- Management: How to set up each change initiative for success throughout its end-to-end journey from inception to launch and beyond.
To deliver on our strategy, we needed to ensure that our business was fully equipped with the know-how required to successfully lead and sustain the transformation. Berkeley’s collaborative and engaging approach quickly helped us to assess needs, create clarity on the best way forward – and secure, strong and wide-ranging support. Berkeley’s deep transformation expertise really shone through in the knowledge solutions they helped us develop and in the pace with which they were able to help us develop them. The result was an engaging and practical set of tools and guidance, which was flexible enough to cater both for those who needed high level direction only – and those who wanted to selectively drill into more detail and best practice.”
Global Transformation Capability Director
A guide to different transformation approaches
The Playbook also provided guidance on alternative ways of approaching the transformation journey to suit different situations. These included:
- Linear approaches suited to contained, well-understood change
- Phased approaches suitable for well-understood change that is large and highly complex
- Iterative approaches suitable for situations where a more experimental approach is required to test and determine the best way forward.
Supporting both the leadership and transformation specialists to deliver successfully
Following our work, the company deployed the Playbook across its organisation, supplementing current governance processes and replacing existing transformation learning solutions and knowledge resources.
The Playbook also enabled the company to better utilise its network of transformation professionals supporting the business, refocusing their efforts on more targeted, higher value support and coaching.
Ultimately, it gives the business’ leaders access to the tools, knowledge and guidance they needed to successfully deliver their ambitious strategic vision.
Tasked with delivering the client’s strategy, business leaders needed practical, engaging, ‘bite-sized’ transformation guidance to set them up for success. We were able to distil our significant transformation expertise into a format tailored to the client’s needs, which will help the leadership continue to grow and develop long after our engagement finished. It was a really rewarding opportunity.”
Mark Bryant, Consultant
The story in numbers
750+
Service centres
60+
Countries
360 million
Global assets
$6 billion
Annual revenue
12 000
People
