How Do Things Happen?
Firstly, how we get started:
- Meet, have a cup of coffee, or a zoom call – we always start with short discussion about your headaches and aspirations.
- From the discussion I draft up an initial proposal which includes a Financial Status Review – this review can either be of your whole business or limited to a single area of concern, but enables me to deep- dive into your world and gain a really good understanding of your business.
- The Financial Status Review findings enable me to then provide a full quote for the job and make a recommendation on what I think the best way forward is.
How much and how often we work together are agreed according to your budget as well as the the time and effort that will be required by your business. Your key staff are not likely to be able to drop everything to help work through immediate change, so assignments are usually scheduled to be a few hours a week across two or three weeks – depending on requirements and staff availability. Of course, if you are in a hurry, work can be carried out in a much more intense burst.
For small issues, or low hanging fruit – this entire process can be accomplished in a few hours…
How long we work together is entirely up to you.
Solutions will vary from client to client, need to need, and project to project; regardless you receive maximum benefits and value.
The Business Processes
Steps used for guaranteeing your success
To guarantee you a successful outcome, you receive standard project management principles throughout our time together, either directly or in the background.
We tailor and agree your work assignment by assignment, as some clients choose to use our expertise to simply identify issues, or tune-up a specific area, while others prefer a full business revamp or a long term relationship and loop from beginning to end repeatedly increasing business success.
The process for your engagement can be big or small – depending on your needs – the amount of assistance you need from beginning to end is totally up to you.
As a Member of CPA Australia I am bound by the Professional Standards Act. The overarching aims of a national regime are to improve professional standards compliance with high standards of quality assurance, risk management practices and disciplinary procedures, as well as required levels of professional development, ensure greater transparency and public accountability applies.
Quality Assurance
Quality Assurance is the planned or systematic actions necessary to provide enough confidence that a product or service will satisfy the given requirements.
Being CPAs and a registered public practice, quality assurance is a mandatory part of our requirements; as a Member of CPA Australia our firm is subject to tri-annual Quality Assurance Reviews – where the standard of our work and work processes are assessed, scored and approved by third party reviewers.
Risk Management
Risk Management is the ability to reliably achieve outcomes you want, and to equally reliably prevent the outcomes you do not want.
At heart, risk management is the Processes of making conscious decisions about appropriate levels
of risk. Ownership, accountability and overview are the cornerstones.
Strategies then need to be developed to manage the identified risks. This involves three types of strategies:
- Contingency Strategies: Bringing down to acceptable risk levels, risks of higher consequence but lower likelihood of occurrence.
- Preventative Strategies: lower consequences but higher likelihood of occurrence.
- Monitoring Strategies: both the likelihood and consequences are relatively low this covers both standard safeguards and ongoing review.
Where an area is identified as posing unsuitable levels of risk we work with you:
- Design risk measurements and metrics
- Risk assessments
- Detailed risk analyses
- Risk reporting
- Issues risk management
- Event capture and loss estimates
- Risk mitigation planning
- Risk acceptance
All risk management processes align with legal and regulatory requirements and include or link to relevant activities such as privacy, information security assessments, continuity of business assessments, and business impact analysis.
Change Management
Change Management is an systematic approach to transitioning from a current state to a desired future state.
This is system and process aimed at helping staff, management and sometimes people external to your business (such as clients) accept and embrace changes in your business environment so your business can move to be more successful.
You also receive a project management process wherein changes to your engagement, that might arise as we progress are formally introduced and approved by you before progressing.
Change Management is a communications piece that overlays the actual tasks, milestones, outcomes etc that are undertaken as part of the engagement. For more information read this blog on project management traps.
Knowledge Management
Knowledge Management is the explicit and systematic management of vital knowledge – and its associated Processes of creation, organization, diffusion, use and exploitation – in pursuit of business objectives.
Your knowledge encompasses both tacit knowledge (in people’s heads) and explicit knowledge (recorded and saved as information in databases, documents etc.).
Many programmes start by focusing on the thrust of better sharing of existing knowledge e.g. sharing best practices. However, if you cannot link the activities to the achievement of business goals, then it is not real knowledge management.
You get leveraged value through knowledge management because we also focus on:
- Customer Knowledge – the most vital knowledge in most organizations
- Knowledge in Processes – applying the best know-how while performing core tasks
- Knowledge in Products (and Services) – smarter solutions, customised to users’ needs
- Knowledge in People – nurturing and harnessing brainpower, your most precious asset
- Organisational Memory – drawing on lessons from the past or elsewhere in the organisation
- Knowledge in Relationships – deep personal knowledge that underpins successful collaboration
- Knowledge Assets – measuring and managing your intellectual capital
What can you expect?
