By Duncan Troup on Monday, March 20th, 2017 in Customer-centric Thinking, Lean and Agile, Workforce Planning.

As many modern day businesses start preparing for the new financial year and thinking about calling a contingent resource agency, pause for a moment and give thought to what you could achieve with a local lean consulting group.

After a very successful 6 months at one of our anchor accounts I noticed something special about the way The Tingle Tree Group deliver and the value derived. It extends on from a previous LinkedIn post on 31st Jan (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/harnessing-power-lost-workforce-how-tingle-tree-lean-duncan-troup) but in this example I provide evidence of how a lean consulting delivery model can make an abnormally large difference with minimal investment.

The Tingle Tree Group have a key client with whom we have completed 6 small service uplift engagements with. The most expensive being $22k and a greatest value being around the $6k mark. All effectively capped Time and Materials – or what I refer to as fixed price by reputation as if we exceed budget it hurts our brand. In a recent client meeting, we were pleased to receive feedback from our buyer who positively stated how happy he was and that service improvements were observably, measurably and reputationally better over the prior period across service desk end user, compute desk top services, and business engagement.

After that meeting, through a number of business lenses, it made me proud to reflect on how we created client value and how the work we do at The Tingle Tree Group is vastly different to the alternative of a contracted agency for 6 months.

FINANCIALLY

A service delivery specialist at $1000 a day would cost about $115k for a six month period whereas our sprints equate to $103k – all with an assured outcome and access to specialists for targeted problem resolution.
We Deliver Financial Value.

DELIVERY AND EXPERTISE BREADTH

The client received expertise across 4 team members of the Tingle Tree Group, all collaborating to deliver the best possible outcome. We provided:

1) A digital / application development thought leader

2) An acknowledged client services leader in the client’s domain

3) An ITSM specialist and

4) An Agile Coach.

I am confident in believing there is no way one ‘mind and body’ could have the business knowledge and capacity to cover all these domains.
We Deliver Expert Value.

DELIVERY MODEL

The interventions were all small in size, with defined outcomes underwritten by a managing partner. We were constantly delivering incremental improvements with the backing of an account manager with domain expertise…not just a peddler of CVs.

We Deliver Incremental Value.

CONTRACTUALLY

The work was divided across 4 work packages limiting the client’s commercial risk and putting the pressure on the Tingle Tree Group to deliver sustainable value in order to gain extensions.

We Deliver Sustainable Value.

FLEXIBILITY

When we experienced higher value problems or a change in context we adjusted the resource blend to match the needs of the client. More agile detail needed? More ServiceNow expertise? We were able to respond quickly.

We Deliver Quick Response Value.

CONTINUITY

The members of the team remain productive, servicing other clients and then back into the customer, meaning there was very little time lost in gaining awareness of the context. Hours billed were hours making an operational difference.

We Deliver Productivity Value

This post isn’t all about the Tingle Tree Group, but about how small niche consultancies can punch well above their weight. This was our strong belief when we started our business and over the course of our first 18 months we have the evidence to show that our business does stand out from the crowd.

The Tingle Tree Group are a niche consulting firm specialising in service improvement through lean thinking, systems thinking and the leverage of your digital / social media assets. We are your business solutions partner and service-centric innovators. We accelerate your business success and maximise customer value through fit for purpose strategy, process, technology and real life insight.

Contact our founder Duncan Troup at Duncan.Troup@TingleTreeGroup.com if you are looking for a refreshing change.