Effective Organisational Planning

Does your organisation sit down as a group and dedicate time to plan the future directions of your organisation? Or does your organisation drift along responding to the various needs of a range of customers?

If you believe your organisation needs to go in a particular direction, the course must be charted and a strategy set, ‘drifting’ allows other forces to determine your direction.

There are fundamental decisions that need to be made when planning the next moves for your organisation, e.g. market segments, customer needs and preferences, core business, growth strategies and many more.

Exploring these issues as a team and making the big decisions together will drive good strategy and a commitment to see it through to implementation.
Mark Douglas is a highly skilled group facilitator with a sound understanding of business processes and organisation planning.

Mark has assisted large, publicly-listed organisations and small businesses with a turnover of less than $1 million, to plan their strategies for growth.

lf you provide the people and the issues, ETHOS Australia will devise the process most suitable for your organisation planning needs. Whether you need to:

• develop a strategic plan or a business plan;
• devise an industry development strategy, or a regional community plan;
• plan a continuous improvement strategy;
• develop a plan or key decisions specific to your business.

ETHOS Australia can assist with professional consultation, group facilitation and documentation of outcomes into a professional plan.

Establishing a Shared Vision Across Your Organisation

It is a strong and meaningful vision that drives personal and organisational change. Vision statements drive positive change. They are the ambition, the desirable future that provides the energy to move from the current reality. Effective vision statements capture the hopes and aspirations of employees and shareholders.
Add meaning, relevance and plausibility to your vision statement through a professionally designed process of consultation and group facilitation.

This process typically involves obtaining a realistic picture of the current reality within the organisation and the environment in which the organisation is operating, then the ambitions of a wide range of stakeholders are distilled into clear statements of intent.

ETHOS Australia has facilitated vision statements for small and medium sized companies, industry associations and government agencies, as well as divisions of multinational companies and regional industry clusters.

Strategic Planning, Business Planning and Organisation Reviews

ETHOS Australia has undertaken numerous strategic planning and business planning assignments with major companies and government bodies, industry groups and universities. We work with a leadership team to arrive at an effective plan to take the organisation from where it is now, to where it wants to be in the future. If consultation with employees and other stakeholders is required, this becomes part of the process.

Planning requirements vary between organisations: some may wish to re-evaluate their strategic direction and the position of their products and services in the market place; others may wish to develop a business plan for the planning of a major initiative to grow the organisation; still others may wish to develop an organisational improvement plan that focuses on developing improvements in operations, product quality, customer relations, staff performance and other less strategic, but very important, issues.

Mark Douglas is also particularly skilled at facilitating effective group decision making under difficult circumstances.

Mark has developed his own effective planning processes which can be tailored to suit the needs of the client. These may include:

• conducting surveys and focus groups with customers and other stakeholders;
• compiling and analysing industry information;
• facilitating planning and decision making workshops;
• facilitating and training others in the storyboard process;