NorthStone^® Planning Services

Most views of business planning assume that process and analysis can predict the future well enough to set strategic direction. However, technology, deregulation and globalization contribute to unpredictable and often irrational market behavior. In today's highly uncertain environment, effective planning means having a clear and widely understood strategic intent, a portfolio view of your programs and projects, an explicit understanding of your assumptions, and the organizational and cultural ability to respond to the unexpected. The bottom line results:

NorthStone's partners are former executives with decades of operating experience across a diverse range of industries and organizations. We know that business value is ultimately what matters, and we understand that people and behavior are central to any effective business process. We've been in your shoes and we know what works.

For more information about specific NorthStone^® Planning Services, click or scroll down: Business Portfolio Management, Strategy Development, Adaptive Budgeting, Results Chain Mapping, Performance Scorecards, Program Management.

NorthStone^® Business Portfolio Management (BPM) is a rigorous method used to select the combination of initiatives and programs that offers the best overall business value for your organization. BPM allows you to evaluate dissimilar opportunities, compare their contribution to your strategic intent, and ascertain the likelihood of projected results. BPM focuses comprehensively on choosing the right things to do, and doing them in a way that creates business value instead of just capability. BPM is the forum for your executives to lead the organization by actively managing its portfolio. In deciding where to invest the organization's resources, they re-examine decisions based on new information and re-allocate resources based on new opportunities.

Ever wondered which strategy framework to apply when? The core of NorthStone^® Strategy Development is selecting and using the strategy framework that best allows your executive teams to answer two fundamental questions: "What is success?" and "How will we know when we achieve it?" Whether you are updating your existing business processes or engaged in a major strategic transformation, we work with you to refine the context, select the appropriate tools and methods, define success and measures, and frame the implementation so that your organization can understand it and act on it.

The annual budget is the tool that transforms strategy into action. Maintaining linkage of strategy to the budget is very difficult in the traditional annual cycle; yet without this link, the budget is a time- and effort-intensive activity that fails to deliver real value. NorthStone^® Adaptive Budgeting provides the framework to transform your budget from a yearly exercise into a strategic process that allows you to adjust your company's spending based on internal and external change. You are able to act with discipline regarding spending commitments and avoid committing your organization to a plan that time has made irrelevant. We work with you to identify specific organizational goals and objectives and customize our work to incorporate your existing business processes.

The Results Chain allows you to prepare a detailed map of the necessary and sufficient elements required to achieve a desired business result. A Results Chain visually displays the linkages between actions, the relative impact of those actions on your intended result, and the implied assumptions and risks about conditions necessary for success. This method includes a specific language set that lets you define metrics for intermediate and final outcomes.

An effective scorecard enables your organization to define and communicate strategic intent, to link decisions and actions directly to overall objectives, and to monitor your progress routinely. Scorecards succeed or fail based on the quality of their metrics. NorthStone's works with you to identify and define your organization's "Key Strategic Indicators" and to make a clear distinction between these and other performance and result measures that you use. A NorthStone^® Performance Scorecard gives your organization clear targets and provides feedback about your progress and direction.

When our clients find that mission-critical programs require outside expertise to ensure successful execution, NorthStone provides comprehensive Program Management services. We focus on obtaining the business value expected from the program, in addition to project management criteria such as cost, schedule and scope. This value-based approach aligns well with our other Planning Services and provides your company with a thorough means of assessing success.