Evolution Of The Aspire ID8 Business Diagnostic Concept

Background to the development of the Aspire ID8 Business Diagnostic Platform

After 30 years working as a business and management consultant I wanted to find a way to empower organisations and teams to ideate and collaborate and accelerate the way they solve problems and define strategic direction without spending excessively on external support by automating the work of management consultancies.

After initially working in the ERP and Business Intelligence industry for 12 years for a diverse range of organisations across a wide range of industry sectors where the need for integrated, standardised ways of working was the bar everyone was trying to achieve. I decided to undertake a Masters in Business Management Research and started to develop a framework to help organisations solve problems in a standardised way.

In 2004 I joined Ernst & Young and was fortunate to work on many global M&A deals including the global demerger of Daimler Chrysler. I also worked with CSC and then HP Enterprise as a managing partner helping to sell and deliver large global outsource deals and business & technology transformation programmes.

In 2016 I left HPE to focus on Aspire and developed the CXO Diagnostics series which provided a series of business function lenses for analysing business problems through. The thinking continued to evolve leading to the idea of cross-fertilising the automation from the ERP industry with the world of management consulting.

This cross-fertilisation of ideas and experiences led to the design of the Aspire ID8 Business Diagnostics product concept in 2017. During the period 2018-2021 the development of the product was slowly self-funded from a range of management consultancy projects.

ID8 Business Diagnostic Platform

We now have a SAAS product that helps clients to turn problem solving and strategy engagements from being a labour intensive exercise that takes 5-6 consultants, 2-3 months work interviewing 50-100 staff for a client at a price tag between￡250k to ￡0.5m plus reduced significantly to a price tag of approx. ￡10k to ￡60K.

The Aspire ID8 product enables us to collect deeper and richer insights from either a small group workshop in 2-3 days and/or involving 100’s of staff in 2-3 weeks . Their input generates a prioritised roadmap for change they have contributed to and that the exec team can sign-off on or adapt. Since staff have been empowered to contribute they believe in the path chosen and are willing to take greater responsibility and ownership for the change activities required.

The Aspire ID8 ‘Ideate’ Business Diagnostics provides a suite of pre-defined analytics tailored to your reporting needs.?The collection of respondent input from staff, customers, suppliers and partners is fully automated through a simple diagnostic interface. The ID8 product provides?fully automated maturity (spider web) diagrams, reports and graphs that help us analyse current state and compare with future state desired to identify the biggest gaps and highest priorities to tackle.

Taking The Pulse Of Your Business

The product provides the ability to take the pulse of the business at a given point in time, set as a benchmark and re-run the comparison at a later point to determine if your change activities have produced the desired results. This time phased comparison capability allows us to use the product as a continuous performance improvement platform to successfully drive the business forward.

We designed the ID8 solution to be tailorable and adaptable. Our best practice frameworks can be adapted with or without our help. There is a self service(DIY) option that enables organisations to develop and use your own diagnostic frameworks. We work with business partners to develop innovative diagnostic offerings that they can deliver a set of differentiated service offerings to their clients.

The ID8product provides unrivalled scalability as it enables hundreds and/or thousands of people to be involved in sharing their points of view, opinions, thoughts, perspectives, improvement ideas, suggested actions and changes in just 2-3 days (focused group working sessions) or 2-3weeks (broader diagnostic exercises) NOT 2-3 months per each sample of 50-100 people through traditional consultancy approaches.

Flexible Service Options

We designed a solution that could cater for a range of budgets through six alternate service options:

• Self-service where we provide initial training and the software licences for you to run your own diagnostic
• Group Workshop based approach which suits teams of 5-20 people involved in the analysis, decision making and action planning process
• Light touch service model involving a small number of interviews in parallel to a diagnostic survey to enable cross validation via a hybrid blended approach
• Full service model involves a larger number of interviews in parallel to a diagnostic survey to provide enhanced cross validation and additional insights.
• Options (5) and (6) are the same as (3) and (4) but with the option of software licences being included to enable future evaluation of the change activity results.

Compliments Traditional Approaches If You Prefer

Potentially our ID8 offering can be used in-conjunction with a large traditional management consulting project:

• ID8 can be used in advance as a low cost way of identifying and narrowing your priorities for the larger consultancy project to focus on and reducing the cost involved as a positive consequence.
• ID8 can be used as part of the project complementing the traditional interview centric approaches of the management consultants engaged.
• The team assigned internally or externally can simply use ID8 as an optional tool to support the preferred approach of the project / leadership team.

Our Priority Is Helping You To Solve Business Problems

I moved into consultancy because I enjoyed working with people to solve practical problems and I have been very fortunate to work on projects covering the spectrum of ERP, business Intelligence & Analytics, M&A, business and digital technology change & transformation, business process and technology outsourcing. I wanted a challenging career with a variety of work that was demanding and the path chosen to date certainly hasn’t disappointed on that front.?

I have been fortunate to work with and learn from many great colleagues over the years and I see the Aspire ID8 Business Diagnostics as away to give something back that can help a wide range of people and organisations to tackle a diverse range of problems in a fast, pragmatic and cost effective manner.?

Thank you for taking the time to read this article today. We greatly appreciate your interest and we welcome the opportunity to discuss your business and digital technology problems, improvement challenges and priorities for change to see how we can best be of service and help you.

Best regards,

Robert Peopall

For further information do take a look at www.aspireid8.com. We welcome your interest and the opportunity to help you with your strategic, tactical and operational problem solving challenges. Email us at: [email protected] or call us on +44 (0)203 908 4346.