Interim Management - two Case Studies

The situation - a Public Sector divestment
When a public sector body decided to focus on its core membership activities and divest its commercial operation to the private sector, we were charged with effecting this transition, to a timetable and with a set of financial objectives.
 
This transition was achieved over a two year period - a process of relocation, downsizing, development of new technical platforms.The company's products too needed to be transformed from  a print inheritance to new digital offerings.
 
What the financial objectives did not calibrate was the degree of cultural change needed to turn a public sector operation into a commercially driven vehicle. Yet all this was accomplished within 24 months.
 
One of the secrets of successfully accomplishing this transformation was the following: what was it that motivated these long term and loyal ex-public servants to work on their products? The answer was a deep commitment to their products and quality. Though they used different language to describe them, they shared the private sector pre-occupation with brand and market position. Creating a common vision over time was a matter of synthesising the best of both the public and private sector cultures within a common cultural and semantic framework.
   

The situation - a Database conversion gone wrong
A major corporate had a division which specialised in the provision of audience measurement data to the advertising industry. The company's traditional skill sets were more attuned to its traditional means of communicating to its market - via print and print analogues on CD. A major database conversion went badly wrong and the company found itself fire fighting internally while it was losing market share to new electronic competitors.
 
We were parachuted in to manage this situation and with a brief to turn things around. Management changes were made. The database conversion was put back on track (introduction of programme management, separation of elements into data/business rules/design elements etc). More fundamentally, a review was carried out of the company's place in its value chain, its brand values (as seen by its customers), and what might be its place in the emerging internet world.
 
Within 12 months, the company was handed back to its Divisional CEO with the database project back on track, new management and a business plan adapted to a world of network products from which it now derives over 80% of its revenues