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organisational culture: understand the impact of your current culture, then define and plan how to get the ideal culture to improve performance at your company.
business strategy: review, define and agree your company strategy. Measure, monitor and update progress to ensure success using this series of workshops.
change management: confused about the best way to implement the changes you want in your company? Use this workshop to identify and plan how to overcome the change issues you face.
knowledge management: want your teams to share what they know to benefit your company? Use this series of workshops to make knowledge sharing part of business as usual at your company.
managing projects: projects are a fact of business life, if you want your projects to get off to a flying start by being focused and effective, use this series of workshops to successfully initiate, review and closedown your projects.
risk management: in today's environment every business has to manage risk effectively. If your company needs to define and control critical business risks or create disaster recovery plans use this series of workshops.
value & cost management: every business needs to maximise value and minimise costs to be competitive. To complete a value management exercise on a product, service, or large capital investment programme, or to consider how to take costs out of your business use this series of workshops.
innovation: want to reinvent your industry or company approach? If you do, use this series of workshops to create innovative ideas that can set your company apart from the rest, even reinvent your industry. Get funding support for new ideas or review progress on the development of previous ideas you are implementing.
bespoke workshops: want a bespoke workshop designed to resolve a specific business issue? Call Younique and we can design your workshop to run at your site within ten working days.
Do your teams struggle to spend quality time on important business issues. Do you need to save money by reducing the time spent dealing with daily business and project issues. Do you want to reduce project delivery time. Do departments have different approaches to the same problems. Do you want to breakdown departmental barriers and hierarchies and get teams collaborating. Are you trying to embody best practices into the way things get done in your company. Do people say what needs to be said in meetings or say what they think others want to hear. Do people avoid making decisions, resulting in further meetings and more cost. Do your processes hinder as much as help. If these issues seem familiar, then your company could benefit from our Quick Win Business Series workshops. These workshops exploit team collaboration technology for 'in the room' or 'remote' over the web workshops. Or a blend of both at the same time!
Younique have developed the business series to create significant benefits from a 1 or 2 day focused workshop that organisations can exploit whenever the need arises. They are designed to: Reduce the time spent on critical business issues by up to 50%, getting the required outputs quicker. Consistently create high quality outputs by using best practice approaches to common business issues. Speed up programme delivery and shorten lead times. Get the right decisions by quickly focusing on critical issues. Create consensus and buy-in to complex business issues. Share knowledge from around your business that would otherwise stay in one area. We make this possible by using technology in workshops where participants work collaboratively and simultaneously. This reduces the time spent working on issues and quickly cuts through any team or cultural dynamics that slow traditional workshops down. One person speaking at a time means that eleven others have to listen before they can speak, or at worst two to three people speaking at the same time and nobody hearing anything! Our innovative approach can work on the client's site using an 'in meeting environment' or run remotely on the web with participants who are in different parts of the country or the world. A blend of the two approaches can be used if required. By the end of the workshop all content produced by the group is output to Word with an unedited but clean format including all agreed actions and decisions. These can immediately be taken away by participants for action rather than waiting the traditional week or more to receive workshop outputs. Our experienced team of consultants can facilitate from our Quick Win Business Series workshops, modify or tweak our approaches to suit your company, or create bespoke workshops given your brief.
These short individual workshops can be combined to satisfy a specific business requirement. Our current business series workshops include:
Organisational culture is a very elusive thing to most people. Everybody talks about its impact but nobody knows how to define and then assess how it is affecting the performance of their company. Well not any more.
This workshop exploits Younique's expertise in cultural development by helping you quantify and benchmark the cultural norms that are most impacting on the long term performance of your company. The workshop is intended for senior management and not as a company wide review. For this type of review please see Culture and Performance. This workshop helps senior staff setting direction for the company gain an understanding of how the current culture has developed, how specific cultural norms account for shared behaviours and how these impact on the performance of your company.
This workshop is targeted at senior managers and exploits the knowledge created from the way we do things around here workshop. This one day workshop reviews the organisations current business strategy and then helps defines the culture senior managers need to win in the longer term.
Knowing is fine, doing is what gets results. This workshop is designed to support culture change planning and builds on the output from the preceding workshops. The focus for the day is to target major gaps between the current and ideal culture required over the longer term. Cultural assumptions, artefacts, norms and values are then explored in chosen areas to create and define the cultural change programme for your business. Senior managers leave the workshop equipped with the knowledge of what needs to be refocused, by when to achieve the desired cultural change and performance improvement.
In today's competitive world having the right strategy is becoming more and more critical. With the pace of change increasing, those with unsuccessful strategies will quickly fall by the wayside. This workshop is designed to take senior managers through a formal strategic review of their company strategy, exploring strengths, weaknesses and core competencies. Managers think about their markets and industry environment, where it has been and where it is going, how other players may affect their position and how this may play out in the future. Strategic options are generated and evaluated against criteria for feasibility, suitability, acceptability, and risk. One option is chosen as preferred before the close of the workshop and compared to the current strategy.
Reviewing strategy is a means to an end, the key to making strategy work is successful implementation. Key to successful implementation is measurement. This workshop breaks your chosen company strategy down in to linked objectives that consider what your financial, customer, internal; and longer-term development aspirations are. Objectives have measures defined and targets are set for delivery of the strategy. Initiatives are defined and prioritised given the resources you have available to implement your strategy.
Your strategy is a hypothesis that is tested by the measurement framework Younique helped to create in Measuring Success. Without ongoing review your strategy can become stagnant and out of date, and you could be dedicating resources to something that isn't giving you the results you want. This workshop is designed to help you review the ongoing success of your strategy and identify any change of direction based on the results you are getting from measurement reports. Managers leave the workshop with a reaffirmed or adapted strategy.
Change is a major part of personal and business life. This workshop is designed to help operational managers and change professionals, manage and reduce resistance to change. The workshop is designed for those people affected by the change. They come together in groups to consider and fully understand the change required. To explore the need for change, its implications and discuss issues and concerns they may have. Barriers and enablers to change are explored and ideas to overcome issues are created. Middle and senior management attend to consider solutions and feedback on concerns and issues. Everyone leaves with a full understanding of the change issues that need to be managed. This workshop is also very successful for change teams that are planning how to overcome resistance to change on major initiatives.
Knowledge sharing starts with trust, the degree of trust in a company is a function of the cultural norms that have embedded themselves over the years and currently prevail. This one day workshop is designed to help managers understand the current culture within your business and define the ideal culture needed for knowledge sharing. The gaps and issues raised are used to inform the development of your knowledge management strategy.
Without a plan you're planning to fail. Armed with the critical understanding your cultural review has given you this one day workshop is designed to help you create the Knowledge sharing strategy for your company. Time is dedicated to considering and identifying where critical knowledge resides within your company and how to exploit it for company advantage.
Now you know where the knowledge resides, how do you share it to get business advantage? This one day workshop is designed to help business managers define core communities of best practice within your company. Managers spend time considering who should champion and facilitate the communities and what resources should be dedicated to development.
These series of workshops are designed to start knowledge sharing off by spending a day in each community building and sharing core knowledge. This is done with representatives across the business that hold knowledge of the subject area. The team spend time starting to populate the community of best practices databases and identify what needs to be discovered. These workshops are critical to the establishment of the knowledge sharing approach.
Every project needs to be initiated properly to ensure a speedy and successful start. This workshop supports project managers by motivating the team with a common understanding of the objectives and scope of the work to be undertaken. Workstreams are defined and work breakdown structures created. Resourcing and timing are estimated and project assumptions identified. Critical work stream dependence/interdependencies are defined. Project risks and controls are scoped, prioritised and allocated. Programme directors, sponsors and customers attend to provide feedback throughout the day.
Change is a fact of business and project life. This workshop is designed to support the project manager when the project is running to review key assumptions made at 'Kick Start'. What's working, what's not, what is progress and dealing with any change issues. If necessary refocusing the project given external influences. Re-motivating the team is also necessary in a project that is subject to change and finding resolution to issues and agreeing a way forward provides this motive for action.
Rapid roll out programmes mean that, with the best intentions, businesses don't always capture what has been learnt and apply that to the next project. This one day workshop is designed to support the project manager in reviewing the best and worst parts of the project and to capture from the team what they want to do differently next time. A focus on where and how new knowledge created is to be applied, together with agreed actions promotes a learning culture on any programme. For a large project these workshops do not have to be at the end. A series of these workshops can be designed in as milestones are complete or workstreams come to an end.
Managing business risk is now a core competence. Most businesses have risk management policies yet few companies successfully and consistently implement them across their business. This workshop is design for operational and risk management professionals to define and prioritise critical business risks and to understand and agree their impact and probability of occurrence. Cross functional or departmental teams can come together to work on the real issues that could affect the continuing operation of the business. A consistent approach to this workshop within each business area results in a successful group-wide risk management strategy.
Identifying and prioritising core business risks is only the beginning of a successful risk management strategy. This workshop is designed to support operational or risk management professionals in defining the controls that need to be put in place. Controls are prioritised given the risks your business faces. During the workshop controls are defined together with resources and timescales needed to protect the business effectively. Senior management participation supports the approvals for action before the end of this workshop.
In current times businesses can't afford to ignore disaster recovery. This workshop is designed to support a team of individuals from each business area in reviewing previously defined business risks, creating scenarios for their occurrence and defining appropriate recovery plans. Recovery scenarios are defined and further actions agreed.
With many core development projects, aligning the project expenditure and development to the strategy of your business is imperative. Yet many businesses fail to do this properly. This workshop is designed to help you create a value framework against which the proposed project spend can be evaluated. Value anomalies are highlighted and creative solutions identified and evaluated. Successful ideas are developed and costed to improve value or reduce costs.
With tightening margins every company needs to manage costs effectively. Whilst nobody likes to talk about the need to cut costs, it is a fact of business life. This workshop is designed to take business managers through a review of cost within their own business areas to identify and prioritise areas for cost reduction. Impact and risk are considered together with timescales and savings over the next and subsequent financial periods.
Maximising value or reducing costs is serious business, as they impact on market share and business competitiveness. This workshop is designed to review the success of the ideas created from our maximising value or managing cost reduction workshops. The results of actions are reviewed and success and failures considered. Actions plans are reviewed and if necessary re-established or cancelled.
In your business do you rarely get quality time to freewheel and think about crazy ideas that could revolutionise your business or your whole industry? If you don't, this workshop is designed for you. Lead by you, the client, on course content, Younique provide the latest techniques to generate great new ideas for your business. This workshop focuses on the art of the possible and anything goes! Although ideas are categorised and prioritised, they are not critiqued heavily in this workshop. By the end of the day participants will have learnt to dream again and will be motivated and enthused by the art of the possible. Areas for further investigation are agreed before the workshop closes down.
Great ideas are only ideas without action, action requires funding. This workshop is designed to help business managers develop the top ideas created by Blue Sky for review by others not involved with the project. This review is called 'the litmus test', where each idea in turn is critiqued and evaluated against criteria for feasibility, suitability, acceptability and risk. Action plans for the most popular ideas are then created and tasks assigned. If DTI funding is required clients arrange for the funding support workshop.
Do you fancy getting 75% of your funding for the development of your business idea paid for by the DTI? Younique is an approved consultancy for the Department of Trade and Industry and can evaluate your business idea against funding criteria. This workshop is designed to create a submission to the DTI for funding of the development of your business ideas. Younique take business managers through the application process and prepare a submission.
With all great ideas they can loose steam and fade to nothing. This workshop (depending on the number of ideas) is designed to allow business managers some time to take stock of where their business ideas have got to, what needs to be done next and to create actions/impetus for keeping ideas alive.
Younique specialise in embodying best practice into collaborative systems to create efficient, consistently high quality outputs and decisions that are bought into by all. Should a client require a workshop designed specifically for a meeting or conference they want held, we can design that for you with 5 - 10 days notice. If you want to use this facility or book a workshop please contact us.
quick wins
contact: enquiries@youniqueltd.com or +44 (0) 770 252 8565
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