BT’s business customer base and its share of spend is continual threat. BT established a business unit to develop new services to help its competitive positioning. The group was formed from the merger of a number of disparate product lines covering international voice telecommunications, international data communications (e.g. Primex), national virtual private voice networks, Centrex and innovations to deliver new access services. David’s challenge was to prepare for the director of the business unit, a coherent business plan for the new unit, binding it into delivery of clear top down objectives.
David followed a twin track approach, working with stakeholders outside the business until to understand their perspectives and expectations, while working with product line staff to generate a coherent plan. David conducted a programme of meetings with the heads of the product lines, and workshops with individual product managers. He developed a map of how each of the constituent product lines covered target customer needs, demonstrating how each fitted into the ‘jigsaw’ required to cover needs comprehensively. In order to prepare a common plan, he prepared templates for the individual plans to be completed by product line, provided advice and challenge to each constituent plan to ensure the good quality and consistent granularity of detail within them. He prepared an integrated plan, pulling together the inputs and preparing a consolidated unit level plan. Once the plan was reviewed and approved by the director of the business unit, David held a series of meetings and presentations with stakeholders to help them understand the new units purpose, scope, objectives and plans for the upcoming 18 months.
The plan successfully underpinned the new units identity, provided a common purpose and a means against which progress could be tracked.