Business Support

DIMCA supports businesses by helping executive management drive and implement appropriate development strategies.

DIMCA supports businesses through strategic transformations with an array of services including medium-term corporate strategy, strategic benchmarking, new product and service development, as well as business process outsourcing and strategic IT projects.

More specifically, DIMCA brings a clear vision of the future of financial management, intermediation, and infrastructures and delivers operational roll-out experience to financial institutions executive management.

Management consulting

DIMCA’s management consulting refers to both the industry of, and the practice of, helping organizations improve their performance, primarily through the analysis of existing business problems and development of plans for improvement.

Organizations hire DIMCA’s services of management consultants for a number of reasons, including gaining external (and presumably objective) advice, access to the consultants’ specialized expertise, or simply as extra temporary help during a one-time project, where the hiring of more permanent employees is not required. Because of DIMCA’s exposure to and relationships with numerous organizations, DIMCA is also aware of industry “best practices”.

DIMCA can also provide organizational change management assistance, development of coaching skills, technology implementation, strategy development, or operational improvement services. DIMCA can bring her own, proprietary methodologies or frameworks to guide the identification of problems, and to serve as the basis for recommendations for more effective or efficient ways of performing business tasks.

Strategic Management

Strategic management is the conduct of drafting, implementing and evaluating cross-functional decisions that will enable an organization to achieve its long-term objectives. It is the process of specifying the organization’s mission, vision and objectives, developing policies and plans, often in terms of projects and programs, which are designed to achieve these objectives, and then allocating resources to implement the policies and plans, projects and programs.

Strategic management is a level of managerial activity under setting goals and over Tactics. Strategic management provides overall direction to the enterprise and is closely related to the field of Organization Studies. In the field of business administration it is useful to talk about “strategic alignment” between the organization and its environment or “strategic consistency”.  “There is strategic consistency when the actions of an organization are consistent with the expectations of management, and these in turn are with the market and the context.”

Strategic management is an ongoing process that evaluates and controls the business and the industries in which the company is involved; assesses its competitors and sets goals and strategies to meet all existing and potential competitors; and then reassesses each strategy annually or quarterly [i.e. regularly] to determine how it has been implemented and whether it has succeeded or needs replacement by a new strategy to meet changed circumstances, new technology, new competitors, a new economic environment., or a new social, financial, or political environment.”

Portfolio Health Check

Background

Portfolio management takes a holistic view of a company’s overall strategy. Both IT and business leaders vetprogram proposals by matching them with the company’s strategic objectives. The portfolio should be managed like a financial portfolio; riskier strategic investments (high-growth stocks) are balanced with more conservative investments (cash funds), and the mix is constantly monitored to assess which programs are on track, which need help and which should be shut down. Program and Portfolio management has been moving from an ad hoc set of activities to standard disciplines and formal practices

Definitions and structures

The portfolio reflects the strategy of the company and the budget authorised by the board. To manage a portfolio in programs will give the company the optimisation of benefits the company is searching for within the portfolio of the companies’ strategy. Budget from the portfolio should be allocated to each Each program should have a strategic definition and should be translated to a set off achievable projects with a priority schedule. The program manager should report back to the portfolio manager the benefits expected and the return of investment. The portfolio manager should manage the dependencies between programs. The program manager should manage the dependencies between the projects in his program. Within the program priorities should be set and choices should be made for each project in the program within the given program budget. Each program is responsible for the benefits delivery for the full set of projects.

Program and Portfolio management has been moving from an ad hoc set of activities to standard disciplines and formal practices.

Program Health Check

Definitions and structures

Vision definition

The Vision Statement provides a customer-facing definition of what to expect from the transformed business – its capabilities, service levels, costs and so on. The changed business might be to deliver a particular service, to perform the same service but in a more efficient way, or to be better than the competition.

Blueprint

The Blueprint defines the structure and composition of the changed organisation that, after delivery, should demonstrate the capabilities expressed in the Vision Statement. The Blueprint is a detailed description of what the organisation looks like in terms of its business processes, people, information systems and facilities and its data. It is used to maintain the focus of the programme on the delivery of the new capability.

Programme Mandate

The Programme Mandate is the trigger for the programme. The programme mandate should describe the strategic requirements of the programme and clearly map back to the overall strategic plans of the organisation.  It must describe the business changes that will result and how these impact existing services and strategies

Business case

The Business Case is used to obtain management commitment and approval for investment in business change, through rationale for the investment. The Business Case provides a framework for planning and management of the business change. The ongoing viability of the programme will be monitored against the Business Case at least at the end of every key stage within the programme.

Benefit profile

The benefit profile provides a full description of each benefit. The identification, monitoring and measurements of benefits are a fundamental part of successful Programme Management.

Benefit realisation plan

The Benefits Realisation Plan is a complete view of all the Benefit Profiles in the form of a schedule defining when each benefit or groups of benefits will be realised and any handover activities that are required. This plan will be developed alongside the Programme Plan and Business Case to ensure close alignment between delivery of capability and realisation of benefits against associated costs and risks.

Programme Brief

The Programme Brief is developed in Identifying a Programme Process and is the starting point for the programme definition. The purpose of this document is to provide an outline justification for the programme including its objectives, risks, cost, timescale and effort estimates. The creation of the Programme Brief avoids having to spend a large amount of time and effort on the full definition prior to deciding whether to continue or not

Stakeholder & communication

A stakeholder inventory is a useful way of mapping the various stakeholders against their interests in the programme and its activities and outcomes. On the basis of this inventory a communication-plan need to be setup.