Micro Business - Bespoke Systems Design

The company was formed by two Partners who are highly skilled in analysing customers operational problems and designing software solutions. Their first three years in business were chaotic, working long hours on a broad range of projects for a handful of customers. Within a short space of time they expanded from a two-man company to a company employing five people.

They tendered for a contract to produce software for controlling the merchandising operation for a national automobile service station network. They were successful, expanded again, moving premises and employing a total of eight people. The two Partners were still very active in the business, directing projects and completing programming tasks as well as having responsibility for all the customer facing duties.

It soon became apparent they were losing control of day to day operations. The symptoms were missing deadlines, project overruns, staff retention, poor quality, mainly on smaller projects. They were concerned that their reputation was under threat and they would lose some important accounts. The Partners decided they needed to stand back and focus on the long-term future of the business and also address some of the more critical operational issues.

One of the Partners was familiar with the NOVO Strategy framework, which was used by his former employer, so they decided to use it for their strategic review. They formed a project team comprising of the two Partners, their accountant and one of the senior systems analysts. The accountant took on the role of Facilitator, ensuring the team completed the tasks on time and acting as 'devils advocate' in team meetings. The project took two months to complete and involved all staff at several stages in the process, which was a major boost to morale.

The outcomes were quite radical and addressed all the strategic and critical operational issues:

• They formed two Divisions with a Partner heading each Division with the intention of extricating themselves from the systems work and concentrating on Customer liaison
• They developed a Growth Plan for the two Divisions covering a three year period
• They introduced a share option scheme to reward the loyalty of staff and hopefully retain their services I the long-term
• They developed a staff recruitment policy which focussed on recruiting people that would add considerable value to the business
• They introduced the EFQM Quality Management framework to help them formulate policies that would make them more efficient, productive and support best practice

They continue to use NOVO to monitor the strategies, every twelve months they complete a strategy review exercise to check the assumptions they made a still valid and there are no major internal or external factors that will have an impact on the future direction of the business.