MOST Analysis

Mission Statement

A great plan requires two things – a detailed understanding of the current situation and a clear sense of direction for the future. In simple terms, in order to get from A to B we need to first know what both A and B look like. For this first session, we are starting with A, before moving onto defining the direction of travel in Workshop 2 next month.

If Team Performance Transformation appeals as a process to be applied to your organisation, then you will be well aware that not everything is running as perfectly as you would like. This is completely normal, especially in an organisation with ambitious standards and aspirations for the future. This first workshop is therefore designed to help you really dig into the data to start to uncover both the areas where there is the biggest gap between actual and desired performance, and to start to uncover the patterns and root causes of these gaps. We start with the data in order to remove a lot of emotion from this evaluation, this workshop is not about assigning blame, merely about understanding so that action can be taken.

This transformation will be multi-faceted, exploring angles which can be overlooked in other transformation processes, so we will be exploring the data from the organisation’s customer reviews, financial performance, comparative performance, staff satisfaction, staff performance, KPI achievement, and business culture as a methodology for grading and benchmarking team performance against key business objectives, both internally and against the competition. The root cause analysis will look at people, processes, technology, systems, management, product, quality assurance, and culture as a methodology for creating understanding.

This is an important exercise for creating a universal understanding of the current business situation and context. Information can easily get trapped in silos, and processes which work brilliantly in one department or for one level of management cause issues in other parts of the business. By exploring the impact of processes and technology on productivity and work satisfaction across departments we can understand which business performance questions it is not possible to answer with the existing data infrastructure. And in even the best run businesses, there is always room for improvement, and external forces which can interrupt the best laid plans, forcing a course correction.

This workshop will require the involvement of the business owners and senior management team, to both be presenting data showing the current situation in key areas but to also to have data presented to them from other parts of the organisation. This will start the conversation for Workshop 2 about the direction of travel, and the possible constraints which may impact progress. This senior level analysis and interpretation will be invaluable but is not the only valid perspective. This will be partly facilitated through the completion of both a SWOT and PESTLE analysis which will allow for the contemplation of both internal and external performance factors and constraints. It is not possible to evaluate business performance without considering the external perspective and the impact of wider social and political events.

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Objectives

1. To understand the key performance indicators that are being measured, to establish whether they appropriately demonstrate both sub optimal and excellent team performance.

2. To be able to interrogate those indicators to generate a fully rounded evaluation of current performance.

3. To establish whether those indicators are conveying insightful information and if not, how they can be improved, or others introduced where appropriate.

4. To understand the key strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats faced by the each of the departments as well as the organisation, using the SWOT analysis model.

5. To gain further insight of the external factors affecting the organisation, by utilising the PESTLE model (Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal and Environmental factors) to analyse how they are impacting current business performance and direction.

6. To then apply the Human Relations Theory to their context, gaining insight into how employee attitudes, interpersonal relationships, group dynamics and leadership styles are affecting organisational effectiveness.

7. To further apply Systems Theory to their context, to understand how smaller systems interact together to create a greater, more complex system and how that further advances the organisation.

8. To understand and be able to apply the Quantitative Management approach to their context, to help identify how decision making can be more informed and efficient.

9. To be able to identify questions which cannot be answered satisfactorily from the indicators and data that are already in place.

10. To develop a plan to complete the necessary data collection to fully define current performance levels of the individual departments and the business.

11. To establish a broad agreement between the Senior Leadership and the Transformation Project Team about the current situation and the key constraints impacting progress.

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Strategies

1. To fully understand the range of indicators that are currently in place and the relevance of the information they produce, the attendees will be exploring their own and other’s data to identify how well they demonstrate acceptable performance and sub optimal performance.

2. For meaningful performance transformation to take place, the attendees need to further establish the practical exploration of that data, to analyse how it is collected, how objective it is and the information it is presenting, so to fully understand the current performance of the organisation.

3. There is a possibility that certain aspects of performance are not being measured adequately, so the attendees will need to examine and identify those areas where the data either does not exist or cannot answer questions satisfactorily, to then plan how that these indicators can be developed.

4. Small groups will then be formed to create SWOT analyses for the different departments, which they can share with the other groups. These will then be used to help create a SWOT analysis for the whole organisation.

5. External and environmental factors will play a huge part in the current performance of the different teams, so practical small group exercises will be set up to compile the PESTLE analysis for each of the departments.

6. A training of Human Relations Theory and how it relates to business will be delivered, to gain insight into how employee attitudes, interpersonal relationships, group dynamics and leadership styles are affecting organisational effectiveness, highlighting areas where they could be improved.

7. To further gain an understanding of how the smaller systems interact together to create a greater, more complex system, together with the relationships that can be formed from that, there will be a workshop teaching Systems Theory, practically how it relates to business practice.

8. Organisations are constantly striving to make more informed and insightful decisions, promoting efficiency in the decision-making process. Workshops teaching and demonstrating how Quantitative Management can be improved within the business practice will be held to improve this area.

9. Small group exercises will be set up to practically explore and analyse the data to understand the questions that cannot be answered from it. From these exercises, a strategy can then be built to establish how the date to answer these questions can be satisfactorily obtained.

10. SMART targets will be set, again in small group exercises for the next workshop to ensure this strategy is being followed and that this new data can be presented.

11. There will be a facilitated discussion for the while group following the presentation of existing data and completion of the SWOT and PESTLE analysis, to reach a consensus and agreement of the current situation.

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Tasks

1. Each attendee will be required to gather data to bring to the workshop, showing current levels of performance for the organisation’s customer reviews, financial performance, comparative performance, staff satisfaction, staff performance, KPI achievement, and business culture. They will each present this data to the other attendees.

2. The attendees will evaluate the data against people, processes, technology, systems, management, product, quality assurance, and culture to begin to understand root causes and interconnectivities.

3. Small group exercises to examine and identify in each of the areas of people, processes, technology, systems, management, product, quality assurance, and culture, questions that cannot be answered by the data provided and determine how that missing data could be mined.

4. Complete departmental SWOT analysis in small group exercises, for presenting and creating a companywide SWOT analysis.

5. Complete an organisation PESTLE analysis in practical small group exercises.

6. Attendees to undertake background reading to gain a good understanding of Human Relations Theory, so they are prepared for a discussion of how that learning can currently be applied to the organisation.

7. Attendees to undertake background reading to gain a good understanding of Systems Theory, so they are prepared for a discussion of how that learning can currently be applied to the organisation.

8. Attendees to undertake background reading to gain a good understanding of Quantitative Management, so they are prepared for a discussion of how that learning can currently be applied to the organisation.

9. Small group exercise to analyse the data against the key criteria to identify which questions cannot be answered by the currently available data. Identify if it is possible to collect the required data with existing systems.

10. Small group exercises to develop a plan to collect the identifies required data by the next workshop, setting SMART targets to ensure goal is achieved.

11. A recording of agreed current situation by all parties and identify the areas needs further exploration.

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