Cascade Strategy Services

Strategic Plan Audits

What is it?

Our Strategy Audits include a comprehensive review of your strategy by our team of experts. You'll receive a written report that assess the quality of the various elements of your strategic plan and provides concrete recommendations for improvements and changes. We can perform the strategy audit either based on a documents(s) that you send to us (such as an Excel file) or from within Cascade if you've already got your strategy inside the platform. The key benefits of the Strategy Audit are:

• Written report with concrete recommendations
• Presentation of findings which you can invite other stakeholders to
• Increased confidence in the execution readiness of your plan
• Benchmark the quality of your strategic plan over time

We can also arrange to repeat the Strategy Audit at regular intervals to provide ongoing insight into the quality of your strategic plan. Our Strategy Audits are a 3-Step process.

1. We will perform an initial review of your strategy and identify key areas for improvement.
2. Our team will work with you to improve the ‘execution-readiness’ of your strategy. This our various workshops and digitization efforts and will result in a strategy that is set up for success in Cascade.
3. We will provide a comprehensive analysis of your revised strategy to ensure that it is execution ready.

Who's it for?

Most organizations can benefit from our strategy audits, and we've yet to complete an audit without finding significant areas to help client's improve the 'execution readiness' of their plans! That said, our audits work best if you already have some semblance of a strategic plan, or at least a high level set of goals that you want to achieve.

Our primary expertise is in the area of strategy and how to write strategic plans that will actually be implementable. We're not necessarily experts on your particular industry, so we avoid giving advice on the actual content of your strategy in terms of the goals themselves.

Strategy Model Workshop

What is it?

Whether you're creating a strategic plan from scratch, or simply want to improve the structure and execution readiness of your existing strategy, one of the key elements that you'll need to get right is your Strategy Model. The Strategy Model Workshop consists of:

• A 2.5hrs session with your leadership team
• Led by a senior strategy specialist from Cascade
• Setting up your strategy structure
• Selecting an appropriate strategic framework
• Implementing the right governance elements to run effective strategy meetings

There are lots of different models that you could implement, including:

• The Cascade Model
• OKRs
• Hoshin Kanri

Furthermore, you may also wish to overlay a Strategic Framework into your plan, such as:

• The Balanced Scorecard
• McKinsey's Strategic Horizons
• Ansoff's Matrix

Here at Cascade, we're completely strategy agnostic but have experience working with most of the models and frameworks out there. Our team will help you to choose what works best for your organization and then implement that in Cascade. We'll also help you with the first steps of creating or modifying your strategy to fit with your shiny new Strategy Model.

Who's it for?

Almost every organization can benefit from a Strategy Model Workshop. Whether you're creating a brand new strategy and want to ensure it's setup right for success from day one, or if you have an existing strategy that has lost momentum, or needs a bit of TLC. 

Our Strategy Model Workshops are designed to be flexible to meet the needs of small organizations right through to large multinationals with complex organizational structures.

Objective & KPI Workshop

What is it?

Creating an effective strategic plan isn't hard. But getting a large group of people to write an effective and consistent set of goals can be a challenge. Our Objective and KPI workshops are a hands-on process of helping your team finalize their strategic plan, with a specific focus on writing powerful Objectives and highly measurable KPIs:

• Custom template (following your Strategy Model) for your team to do pre-work
• A 2.5hrs session with your leadership team
• Led by a senior strategy specialist from Cascade
• Coaching on how to write powerful and meaningful Objectives
• Coaching on the creation of tangible KPIs to measure the success of your strategy
• An introduction to leading and lagging KPIs and how to use them

By the end of the workshop, you should have:

• A fully populated strategic plan in Cascade
• Detailed Objectives for each of your leadership team
• A strong mix of leading and lagging KPIs for each Objective
• An easy framework from which to populate your Projects

You're not just getting a workshop, but rather a well-designed process that starts with a customized template where your team can do their strategy pre-work. This flows all the way through to the final output of having a first version of your completed strategic plan.

Who's it for?

All organizations can benefit from an Objectives & KPI Workshop. Whether you're creating a brand new strategy and want to ensure it's setup right for success from day one, or if you have an existing strategy that has lost momentum, or needs a bit of TLC. Even if you're just looking to upskill your leadership team on how to write goals which are truly SMART.

Our Objective & KPI Workshops are designed to be flexible to meet the needs of small organizations right through to large multinationals with complex organizational structures.

Strategy Governance

What is it?

Now that you have an Execution-Ready strategic plan, it's time to start the hard work of strategy implementation. Our Strategic Governance workshops are a hands-on process of helping your team develop and implement a Strategy Rhythm within your organization:

• Custom template (following your Strategy Management Process) for your team to do pre-work
• A 2.5hrs session with your leadership team
• Led by a senior strategy specialist from Cascade
• Establish a set of meetings to review and discuss different areas of the strategy
• Develop a set of Snapshot Reports and Dashboards to use in your meetings

By the end of the workshop, you should have:

• Detailed set of meeting agendas to implement within your organization
• Supporting Snapshot Reports and Dashboards built in Cascade
• Regular reminder emails scheduled

You're not just getting a workshop, but rather a well-designed process designed to make sure you are getting the most out of your Strategic Plan. The true benefits of the workshop will come from the behavioral changes that you'll drive throughout your organization.

Who's it for?

Really any organization can benefit from a Strategic Governance Workshop. Maybe you are implementing a new Strategy process for the first time, or refining the processes already in place. Either way, working through your meeting and reporting structure can ensure your teams are staying focused on executing the strategy!

Our Strategy Governance Workshops are designed to be flexible to meet the needs of small organizations right through to large multinationals with complex organizational structures.

Quarterly Strategy Reviews

What is it?

Implementing a successful Strategic Governance program is a great start to ensuring you stay focused around delivering your strategy. However sometimes, it can help to have your strategy meetings facilitated by an expert. Cascade's Strategic Progress Reviews work as follows:

• Quarterly meetings for your leadership team
• Facilitated by a strategy expert from Cascade
• Typically 2 hrs in length
• Review what's going well for your strategy
• What you can do to improve focus and execution
• Necessary changes to your Strategy Model
• Additional Objectives, Projects or KPIs

The key benefits of having a strategy expert from Cascade facilitate these sessions, rather than simply running them yourselves are:

• Maximized usage of Cascade Dashboards & Snapshots
• An impartial third party with experience working with senior leaders
• Actions, next steps and takeaways documented for you
• A consistent and seamless strategic management process

We'll run the meetings either onsite at your offices, or remotely depending on your location. We'll also couple them with the a separate Cascade Quarterly Business Review where we'll introduce your team to new Cascade features and discuss the general health of your Cascade implementation.

Who's it for?

Most organizations can benefit from facilitated strategic progress meetings. You might find that after a year or so, you feel comfortable to take over running the meetings yourselves, and that's great! But regardless having an expert from the Cascade team to get you off to a great start for your new strategy is sure to bring value as your organization adjusts to its new Strategy Rhythm.

Our Strategy Governance Workshops are designed to be flexible to meet the needs of small organizations right through to large multinationals with complex organizational structures.

System Integrations

What is it?

You have lots of data flowing throughout your organisation, tracking progress, metrics, performance etc. Rather than wasting time manually entering this data into a new system for reporting, we’ll help you make Cascade the central repository for all of your corporate performance information.

• Feed financial data into Cascade Dashboards to track your performance
• Update Cascade with the progress of your Projects
• Keep your employee information up-to-date in Cascade
• Enable Single-Sign-On, no more remembering passwords!

After the initial planning session, you should have:

• A clear idea of how Cascade integrates with your other systems
• A list of systems that you wish to connect to
• Some new ideas for KPI’s and Metrics

This is not just a technical discussion for IT professionals. We’ve seen lots of different ways to measure progress and performance and can help you unlock the value of the data you capture in your other systems.

Following the initial session, our team will work with you and/or your IT team to ensure that the various systems are connected and running smoothly.

Who's it for?

Every organisation can benefit from integrating Cascade with their existing systems. Regardless of your size, you will have data sitting somewhere that you’d like somewhere else.