Services
Our Service Journey
Our service journey covers three stages:
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1. Strategy
Ensure your organisation or busienss unit has a clearly articulated business plan, a clear vision, a roadmap and the right people and skills.
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2. Product
Help you to shape your product offer to ensure you have a well defined product or service offer, aligned you your target market and ensure you have a plan and the right skills for managing the full product lifecycle.
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3. Operations
Work with you to design an operating model, enabled by the right tools and processes to put your strategy into action. We aim to ensure efficient and effective delivery and clear performance measurement for continual improvement
Strategy
Business Audit
Understanding root cause business issues, or understanding market opportunities begins with a thorough unpacking of key business and market data. A business audit is typically the first step for clients that want to evaluate more strategic business challenges, with a view of writing a new business plan, or significantly refreshing their existing plan. This could be in response to major business or market changes, such as an acquisition, regulatory change, or even where small organic changes over a long period lead to a need for a realignment.
Our business Audit undertakes a broad based assessment of key business information such as financial performance, product pricing, and propositions, sales and marketing, and operating model data. At the end of the audit we will provide a breakdown of key business themes, challenges, and opportunities which can be used to inform a new business plan, or make more tactical decisions.
Business Vision, Purpose, and Plan
Ensuring the right business outcomes all depends on being aligned around a clear vision, an agreed purpose and a clearly articulated business plan. We often find that businesses can underperform because there is a lack of shared understanding across business decision makers about what the business is aiming to achieve beyond financial objectives
Business Vision, Purpose and Plan is an intensive process of bringing senior business decision makers together to collectively agree a plan. We use information from the business audit, along with a set of business strategy tools to zero in on key business questions, and then get the team to align around an agreed solutions. From here we agree a high level business vision, purpose and a plan for execution.
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Roadmap
The business roadmap is the follow on to the business vision, purpose and plan. It breaks your strategy down into phases, defining the sequence of events, timing, and resources required to bring your strategy to life. The roadmap accounts for the urgency and criticality of execution, as well as the key business dependencies needed to execute. These might include investments in people, technology and tooling, or operating model. We work with you to develop a roadmap, supported by a high level business case that will enable your business to plan out its initiatives and investments over the next 12 - 36 months.
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Leadership and People
Ultimately a strategy is executed by people. We work with you to assess the people and skills required to successfully deliver on your plan. This includes not only the organisational structure, but also an assessment of available skills and and optimal headcount required to deliver on your strategy and roadmap. We map out clear ownership of strategy deliverables and identify any gaps that inhibit execution. We also ensure you have the right performance measures in place to ensure that your people can measure progress along the way
Product
Game Plan
The AFGP Game Plan takes a comprehensive assessment of the key facets of your product offerings, from the core customer challenge and value proposition, through to analysis of your distribution model, competitor offers and unique differentiators. A Game Plan works in several ways. First, it's an audit of your existing or planned product or service offer, ensuring you have fully considered all of the factors needed to be successful. Second it helps you to fill in any identified gaps in your offer. Finally the process itself helps to ensure your business and product teams are aligned on product purpose and value proposition, ensuring everyone is executing on the same product strategy.
We can offer two models of engagement
1. A lightweight Game Plan, which only needs a short workshop to complete an overview assessment.
2. A detailed Game Plan, which undertakes a more thorough assessment of a product offer and the market it is operating in.
Positioning, packaging and pricing
Once a you have a product game plan in place, it's time to put your products strategy into action.​We can help you to define:
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Core product propositions and unique selling points
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Product pricing approaches to support your product and business strategy
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Product portfolio packaging, positioning and bundling
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Product sales and channel management approaches
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Engagements are typically project based and can cover the entire scope of product strategy, or can focus on specific elements e.g. pricing
Product Lifecycle Process Creation
All products require ongoing management throughout a full lifecycle, from innovation, through to testing, launch, continual improvement and eventual withdrawal. This lifecycle requires a set of end-to-end processes that can help you to increase speed to market, improve customer satisfaction, and ensure your products keep pace with evolving customer demand
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AFGP can help you to put in place the key business processes required to deliver an end-to-end product lifecycle, including design of key processes, governance and performance measurement.
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Engagements are typically project based can cover the design of a full process, or can focus on specific areas e.g. Innovation process management.
Product Management Training
We have decades of experience in product management. Our training courses and coaching for those new to product management or experienced product managers wanting a refresh. We cover the full lifecycle of Product Management from strategy through to product withdrawal. We use our own experience and examples to illustrate and explain how to manage each stage.
You can attend a mixed one day course with attendees from other organisations, or arrange a dedicated course on your premises for up to 10 people. We can also follow up with regular coaching sessions where your team can benefit from ongoing support to put their learnings into action.
Operations
Operations Plan
If products and services are your source of revenue, then operations are where you make your profit. Operating efficiently and effectively is essential to ensure you can deliver on your promises, and that you can do it profitably.
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Our Operations Plan takes a deep dive into your operations process and uncovers areas of improvement. We can identify hot spots where you can adapt your operational strategy, operating model, client engagement model and measurement processes to improve operational performance.
Engagements are typically project based and take inputs from the business strategy, internal stakeholders, client feedback and financial analysis to produce a documented operational strategy and action plan.
Operating Model
An operating model identifies the key business functions required to deliver value to your clients, as well as profitability to your business. It defines how your business should work to deliver on its strategic priorities. Client needs and commercial and business priorities are constantly evolving. Many businesses fail to adapt their operating models to adapt to this change. A change in commercial model, technology, or client requirements can often necessitate a new way of operating.
We can help you to define and design the optimal ways of working that put your business strategy into action. Increase efficiency, build agility, improve governance, and grow employee satisfaction with the right team structures and processes.
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​Engagements usually range from one to several weeks, where we analyse your business performance and pipeline, as well as your service structure and forecasting and make recommendations on how this can be brought into alignment.​​
Systems Selection
There is a bewildering amount of technology available to enable your business to work more efficiently and effectively. Every business is unique, and there is no one-size-fits-all solution that's guaranteed to work for every business. We have decades of experience in working in technology and have helped businesses of all kinds to navigate the complexity of selecting the right business tools.
From Content Management Systems, through to service management tools, billing, and martech platforms, we can help you to select the right tools for your needs. We can guide you through the RFP writing and vendor assessment processes, tool evaluation and commercial negotiations with technology vendors to help you get the best deal and ensure the tools you select clearly match your business ambitions.
Success Measurement
Manage what you measure and measure what you manage. Most business reporting measures are retrospective. Sales, revenue and margin are very important metrics, but often provide only limited insight into why you were successful and what you need to do in the future. Understanding which business metrics that really act as lead indicators that predict business success is critical to continually improve your business performance and achieve your business goals. This is especially important if you are making a change to your business strategy, such as implementing productisation, which will demand an entirely new approach to business metrics.
With a thorough understanding of your business goals, we can help you to identify the critical success factors and align your teams around performance metrics that are meaningful, help them make better decisions and drive better results.
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Engagements are typically project based and take inputs from the business strategy, internal stakeholders, clients and financial analysis to produce a refined list of KPIs and metrics.