Smart business thinking

We work with you to develop and deliver your business vision.

No challenge is too large or small. We can reach out to a large network of subject matter experts and associates to bring the right combination of skills and expertise to meet your needs. We are able to support you from initial strategic thinking all the way though to full implementation of your vision.

To achieve this we combine tried and tested consulting methodologies with new and innovative techniques, customised to meet your specific requirements.

We have a depth of capability, underpinned by our partnerships and networks and illustrated in these web pages, that transcends client expectations for a small consultancy and provides a one-stop-shop for many of your consulting needs. Please have a browse around and feel free to contact us if you would like to know more about any specific area of expertise.

To join our client list and experience first hand the benefits of working with Intelligent Linking, please contact Tracy Pettingale to arrange an initial consultation:

tracy.pettingale@intelligentlinking.co.uk

Developing Vision & Strategy

Strategy Development

Its vital to refresh your business vision and strategy from time to time. To review your current position and to set direction for the business going forward. A compelling and tangible vision combined with a clear strategy to achieve that vision is an essential component in the business management life-cycle. It provides an opportunity to motivate and align the activities of employees and partners and a checkpoint to react / adapt to an increasingly complex and rapidly changing business environment.

We deliver a strong focus on rapid analysis leading quickly to improvement actions and helping your organisation to quickly realise its potential. We leave lengthy strategic reviews to our (and your) competitors.

Through a rapid and often intense process of consultation, workshops, and desk research we will work closely with your leadership team and other key stakeholders to create a vision and strategic ambition for the future of your organisation that takes into account:

• Your current performance / status
• Your key market performance
• Competitor profiling
• Your stakeholders perspective
• Horizon scanning / opportunity development

Working with Intelligent Linking your organisation can quickly produce a vision and strategy the will underpin performance improvement and the means to realise your business goals.

Key Approaches: Open Source Leadership, Evidence Based Strategy, Snapshot Strategic Review. Customer Enabled Strategy Formulation. Sustainable Strategy.

Developing Vision & Strategy

Strategic Planning

90% of organisations fail to achieve their strategic vision through a combination of poor communications and insufficient capacity or motivation to deliver the required change. Our approach to strategic planning combines powerful communication tools with change management and project management skills to deliver the desired outcomes with minimum disruption and a rapid realisation of value.
We will work with your organisation to:

• Ensure coordination between your strategic and operational goals
• Identify the key milestones required to deliver your strategy
• Involve your wider stakeholder perspective in the planning process
• Maintain a high degree of flexibility in order to help you adapt to a changing business environment
• Utilise performance management frameworks  such as the balanced scorecard
• Provide the motivation and capacity for change across your organisation
• Plan to deliver your change through iterative, manageable steps

Our approach is underpinned by a simple yet powerful methodology called 3 dimensional strategy. It provides the essential linkage between your strategic goals, your stakeholders goals and your process goals to provide a highly effective / integrated plan.

Key Approaches: 3D Strategy, Balanced Scorecard

Developing Vision & Strategy

Marketing Strategy

A marketing strategy that can effectively communicate your products and / or services and engage your customers in the delivery of your strategic vision will set your organisation apart from the rest. We work with our strategic partners at Zest to help you focus your marketing efforts to achieve measurable, sustainable and highly effective results.

We seek to ensure that your marketing strategy is effectively aligned to your business strategy, and that the activities and operating model of the organisation reflect the brand values that underpin your strategy.

We apply a simple yet highly effective analysis framework that considers three elements of  your marketing focus:

• Operational Focus
• Product Focus
• Customer Focus

… to quickly establish the right emphasis on marketing strategy development supported where required by market research and analysis.

Key Approach:  Market Focus, Tracy & Wiersma Analysis Framework.

Key Partners:  Zest

Developing Vision & Strategy

e-Business & IT strategy

I.T. plays a vital role in the efficiency and effectiveness of modern businesses. However, organisations often fail to get value from the I.T. investments they make. New and emerging technologies promise to ‘change the way we work’. Our approach at Intelligent Linking is to put your business back in control and to adopt or adapt your I.T. to work for YOU. This helps to make the most of your investment and delivers value for money. Our IT strategy solutions include:

• Technology Architecture
• Systems Architecture
• Applications Architecture
• Information Architecture
• Knowledge Architecture
• Information & Compliance Strategies
• eCommerce Strategy
• Web Strategy
• IT diagnostics and planning

We pride ourselves in designing IT enabled businesses where technology underpins the delivery of value.

Key Approaches – Automate, Communicate, Network, Intelligent Systems. eMaturity Modelling, Enterprise Architecture. Information Architecture. IT Architecture.

Developing Vision & Strategy

Business Blueprint & Process Design

The business blueprint is a design for the future organisation that will deliver your vision. It provides a detailed description of your future businesses processes and how your strategic  goals will be achieved.  The Blueprint acts as a guiding light for change and provides the basis for alignment of your organisation to the strategic vision. Developing a Blueprint significantly enhances your organisations ability to deliver its vision.

In many companies, business processes are developed over long periods of time in response to immediate needs. As a result they can evolve in an unplanned manner and ultimately cause a lack of cohesion in business operations. Intelligent Linking have worked closely with a wide range of organisations to review and reconfigure their essential processes to avoid cumbersome structures and will apply this expertise and knowledge to bring efficiency and flexibility to your business.

Key Approaches: Value Chain Management, Customer Centred Business Design. Organisational Design.

Implementing Improvement

Programme & Change Management

We firmly believe that change / and particularly strategic change, must be delivered in smaller, manageable and iterative steps. Taking this approach provides the opportunity to:

• Create momentum and early wins – to demonstrate the improvements are real
• To take stock and adapt planned change to a changing business environment
• Embed new developments
• Minimise operational disruption
• Manage financial commitment and impact

We provide services that help to deliver your projects and programmes within the context of a well planned and managed programme or project management framework. We seek to ensure the right capacity, capability and resources are available to support your required change, and will work with you to deliver on time and in budget.

Key approaches: Prince II, Rapid Prototyping & Iterative Development Framework.

Implementing Improvement

Performance Management

How are you really performing?

In their book The Balanced Scorecard, Kaplan and Norton say, ‘If you don’t measure, you can’t manage.’ In an increasingly complex world,  integrated performance management solutions are vitally important to ensure that people within your organisation are focussed on the objectives of the business and equally that they are recognised for their contribution.

Organisations typically measure performance through business metrics and indicators that reflect historic and usually financial outcomes. They often fail to connect personal and business performance. Consequently the organisation generates inconsistencies in the way in which people are recognised and rewarded for their efforts, and can often turn a planning cycle into a “guessing game” that at best reflects the outcomes of the previous year and results in de-motivating the team. 

We work with you to ensure that the way performance is defined and measured in all aspects of your business; Financial, Customer, Internal Operations and Learning & Growth -  is developed and reported within a balanced framework that helps support decision making and a forward looking perspective of performance.

Key approach – Balanced Scorecard, Management Dashboard, Business Intelligence Framework.

Implementing Improvement

Knowledge Management

Knowledge or ‘intellectual capital’ is the most valuable asset in every organisation. Often this knowledge is ignored, duplicated or lost. We will work with your organisation to change the perspective of knowledge and help ensure that your organisation is able to deliver a high return on its intellectual capital through developing:

• Clear leadership, direction and management of organisational knowledge
• A collaborative culture that actively shares and re-uses knowledge
• Enabling I.T. that underpins the development and use of knowledge
• Clearly defined processes to create, capture, disseminate and use knowledge

The expected result is that your organisation will get improved value from your data, information, insights, expertise and experience.

We have developed specific capability to understand the dynamics and performance of collaboration. Whether this is within or across organisational boundaries we are able to help define a collaborating team environment that creates the maximum opportunity for success.

Key Approaches: Applied Knowledge Framework, Knowledge Maturity Model, Taxonomy Design, Collaborative Framework.

Key Partners: Knowledge Consulting Ltd.

Implementing Improvement

Market/Business Intelligence

Intelligent Linking can help your organisation to make better use of existing sources of internal and external information and intelligence to gain a thorough understanding of their marketplace and the challenges and opportunities it presents.

Many companies make the mistake of examining only external data, when in fact, they possess large amounts of untapped information internally. We can help synthesise all the relevant data, both external and internal, to help you gain vital insight.

We can also help you to assess your relative strengths and weaknesses in your marketplace by providing competitive intelligence and looking objectively at what industry competitors are doing

Key Approaches: Market Segmentation. Market Profiling. BI Framework / Management Dashboard.

Key Partner: Greenstone

Implementing Improvement

Market Research

Whether formulating strategy, reviewing a product or service or simply testing market perceptions we can design highly cost effective and relevant market research programmes that will provide a penetrative insight to your customers, consumer, partners or suppliers perspective.

We use a range of face to face, telephone based, workshop based and web based data capture to design and overarching research methodology that fits with your research needs.

We can rapidly analyse results and turn these insights into actions that will improve the performance of your organisation.

Key Approaches: Web Survey. Consumer Research. Social Survey. Mystery Shopping.

Key Partner: Commssavvy Research.

Creating New Capabilities

Training & Development

A business’ greatest asset is its people. Intelligent Linking recognises that one of the most important investments you will ever make is in developing key staff and empowering them to achieve your organisation’s core objectives. We do this by,

• Helping team members to identify their core skills and competencies
• Coaching executives to maximise their strengths and increase their capacity
• Promoting better teamwork
• Encouraging team members to understand and facilitate each other’s roles
• Move teams towards better collaboration, focusing on organisational goals

Our training and development methodology helps people to build awareness, engagement and take personal actions to internalise the learning leading to sustainable skills development.

We can deliver learning through a variety of means including classroom, on the job, on line and blended learning programmes. We will often partner with existing training institutions  / academic institutions to customise learning to fit your specific needs

Key Approaches: Leadership development. Business Skills. Engage, Communicate, Internalise, Act Framework.

Key Partners: London South Bank University Business School, University of Kent Business School.

Creating New Capabilities

Innovation & Capability Development

The intelligent linking have a strong track record in supporting innovation and the development of new organisational capability. Combining analytical and creative techniques we work with your existing evidence base to help design and formulate new capabilities, approaches and services. Whether this is to develop new products and services or to create new capability to support existing products and services we have a strong track record in innovative design.

To achieve the right outcome we work with you / your partners / your customers and other relevant stakeholders to open the organisation to inspiration and ideas, create focus on clear and tangible opportunities and put processes in place to make those opportunities a reality. 

Particularly in the case of policy development and public consultations that are often a feature of public service and a growing requirement for businesses,  we specialise in the development and delivery of engaging and highly interactive events that promote understanding both in the attendees and the sponsoring organisation(s).

Key Approach: Open Source Leadership, Insight 2 Implementation (Process design), R&D methods, Customer Led Innovation.

Creating New Capabilities

Team Building & Events

Team building is not just a good idea but a science! A recent CIPD survey revealed that more than 80% of organisations found that team building activities maximised the potential of their employees and resulted in a boost in company performance.

Through extensive experience Intelligent Linking have been able to draw the important distinction between team building exercises that are simply fun and those that result in a longer term, positive change in company atmosphere and collaboration. We help teams of people to bring out the best in each other and work together for success.

In a globalised economy, where your employees now form and retain multiple relationships both on-line and offline, these exercises that often cross organisational boundaries, help to establish essential foundations of trust, empathy, belief and co-operation that are vital to ensure the success of distance based relationships for your organisation.

Our events service can work with you to manage all aspects of your business events. Working with our marketing service partner Zest, and our European services partner Erisa, we can help conceive, design, market, facilitate and deliver both internal and customer focused events that have a lasting impact long after your event is over.  We have experience in developing and operating commercial international conferences in the UK, Germany, Holland, Spain, Belgium, Ireland and France (and one on a boat!). One important quality of our planned events is that they are typically designed to engage and encourage participation.  If your plan is to have people sit and be talked at, then maybe our service is not right for you!

Key Approach: Interactive Events Event Planning & Management Framework. Outward Bound Team Building.

Key Partners: Erisa International Events, Dolygaer Outdoors Pursuits Centre, Lake District Outward Bound Centre.

Creating New Capabilities

Meetings & Workshop Facilitation

Intelligent Linking can act as your facilitator to address multi-layered business challenges. We have worked with clients ranging from small businesses with a modest number of stakeholders to major government departments and international businesses with literally 100’s of participants, addressing complex management issues. Our goal is to provide the environment, motivation and engagement for your team to work together to confront your business challenges and identify and plan to act on delivering appropriate solutions.

For complex challenges we achieve progress through use of the Open Source Leadership (© Gadman and Cooper) methodology that helps your team to work through the following phases towards the resolution of the business issues:-

• Awareness - Evaluating the situation, often getting under the skin of the visible symptoms to uncover underlying issues and clearly communicating the issues to the team to build a collective “awareness” of the true position today
• Attention - Stimulating the development of solutions, encouraging creative thinking and managing conflict resolution and prioritisation. Helping participants to “personalise” their contribution and pay attention to resolving issues.
• Intention – Developing the plans and commitment to delivering solutions. Helping people to declare their intent in relation to developing the way forward.

• Structure – Laying down the foundations for and developing and delivering solutions.

Whether you need to address complex issues, or simply want engaging and professionally facilitated conversations, we design our solutions to meet your specific needs with attention to detail and an enviable track record of success.

Key Approaches: Open Source Leadership, CWDM (Collaborative Workshop Design Methodology), Visioning Workshop, Problem Solving Workshop.

Creating New Capabilities

Internal Consulting Development

Knowledge Transfer is an important element of our customer focus. We seek to help your organisation to understand our methods and approaches so that you can re-used and apply the approach in a range of future contexts.

We share our intellectual capital with you to help you sustain change and improvement once our work is complete. To achieve this we provide a range of internal consulting development services that can be designed to meet with specific needs, or focus on particular elements of the Intelligent Linking approach that are relevant to you.

Following participation in the Internal Consulting Development programme Intelligent Linking will offer you opportunities to work as business partners in delivering programmes to other clients. This provides you and people within your organisation with:

• Improved ability to deliver sustainable improvement through “knowledge transfer” of the methods used
• Access and insights into the methodologies used so these can be re-used in other contexts within your organisation
• Potential to generate revenue streams by working with Intelligent Linking on other client assignments, and often covering the costs of initial development
• Staff development / experience from working alongside Intelligent Linking on other external client assignments (through a sub-contract / sabbatical arrangement with the client firm)

Most of our competitors are highly protective of their methods and approaches. We believe in an open, collaborative approach to consulting services. We happily share our methods with clients and collectively seek to create improving outcomes for your and our organisations and the people within them.

Key Approaches: All of the Intelligent Linking delivery methods are available to be licensed and implemented by our client development teams.

Key Partners: We encourage all of our customers to become part of this experience.