Recently I was speaking with a potential client about their business. I'd asked all the usual questions...

• How are your projects progressing?
• How are your project budgets looking?
• Are you getting everything you wanted delivered or cutting things out?

The answers weren't totally surprising:

• They're all on track and on-time.
• Healthy and on-budget
• Yes

I could see the client was looking to end the call, however I knew a little about the client, specifically that they're not put off by being direct and to the point. So I decided to hit the client with a pretty blunt observation:

• "If you've got everything running so well, then there's probably no room for improvement... this is as good as it gets. Are you happy with that?"

As I said, I knew the client wouldn't be shocked by the question, but it was still a bit a gamble... throw of the dice and see where they land situation so to speak.

They took a few moments to reply, but admitted it wasn't exactly the type of mindset that would find efficiencies and productivity gains. In fact it was almost a certainty that they would find improvements.

It's been a pretty common theme we've found over the years. A hesitance to actually making an improvement when the opportunity arises. That's why as a business leader, you've got to be open to the realization that in order for your business to grow, customers to be happy, projects get delivered, you've got to first be open to looking for improvement.

When some businesses conduct a Historic Strategy Profiling Review workshop, we'll start by asking a pretty simple question:

• Are you wanting to verify your current thoughts on how efficient and great your teams and business has been performing or,
• are you looking to find situations and areas where you could have been more productive and efficient?

That's the great thing with Strategy Profiles, unlike the adoption of agile methodologies into a business you can profile your business's past. To highlight this, when you adopt agile into your business, you can't easily or quickly go back over the last 24, 12 or even 6 months, size all your tasks to understand the effort necessary, place them into sprints that didn't happen and measure what your burn-down and velocity rates were. You start at zero and take several months to figure out what your velocity rate and your burn down rate is. You're starting out blind hoping it's a good number and that it will improve.

Strategy-AI, has from the very beginning been a tool that let's you review your past efforts. From day one, you know what your current Strategy Profile Alignment Score is and you know what it's been in the past thanks to our Historic Strategy Profiling Review workshops. Our reports and charts make it super easy to visualize and understand without needing to get bogged down in Excel.

It's been a really eye-opening experience for many of those who have gone through the workshops. Many have had their perceptions re-aligned. Many thought they'd been performing really well strategically, only to find out their perception didn't align. With the data actually analysed and "on paper" so to speak (Strategy-AI is a digital SaaS product but you get what we mean by "on paper") the purchasing and procurement managers understood the value to be gained in using Strategy-AI, all from one workshop.

If your looking to make an improvement in how you or your teams deliver your projects, on-time, on-budget... reach out and we can have a conversation on how a Historic Strategy Profiling Review workshop will show you exactly how aligned you are, have been and the improvements you can make.