How We Help You

What we do for our clients

We support our clients to:

Combining people and operational data to make better business decisions

On average 73% of company data remains unused for actionable insights, predictions and metrics.*

This is particularly the case with people data. Your ERP systems contain a wealth of data including: the evolution of your people costs in different units over time; where organizational inefficiencies reside; how effective managers are over time in developing people and retaining the top performers; the cost of discretionary teams; the complexities of reporting lines and “dotted lines”, etc. But this highly valuable data is often left on the shelf, while business leaders and HR engage in qualitative discussions (e.g., “Bob is a great manager”). And, when you really need to get access to the data, it often requires expensive consulting services.

Quartz’s solution is the Quartz Efficiency Driver, a software solution that combines your people data with operational reporting to answer specific business questions covering cost, performance and complexity; then, to manage the workflow to get the changes implemented. Our objective is not to create pretty visualizations but to support leadership decision-making in as near real time as possible. We use our proprietary cloud-based solution to analyze in a few hours what takes other consultancies several weeks and significant cost to understand. And we are able to compare your results against the Quartz Management Spans and Layers database and the Quartz/ Harvard Business Review database of over 2,500 reorganizations.

Given our consulting experience using highly sensitive personal data, we use enterprise level security level and encryption for data in rest and transit. And, in contrast to similar systems we can have our system up and running in a matter or weeks not months or years.

The Quartz Efficiency Driver is available as a stand alone solution available to customers to use themselves, or embedded within Quartz consulting products, enabling our teams to help you get to insight and action much quicker.

* Source: https://go.forrester.com/blogs/hadoop-is-datas-darling-for-a-reason/

Use people & ops data to make
better business decisions

Intelligently cut organizational costs

Quartz’s leaders have significant experience of cost reductions from the 2007-08 financial crisis and beyond. Stephen and Suzanne were leaders of McKinsey & Company’s “rapid restructuring approach” from this time. Peter led reorgs and turnarounds of SMEs to multi-billion internationals and was part of the Transformation Alliance. Quartz brings a standard 5 step process to manage this challenging endeavor. Analysis by an Oxford University statistician shows that you are 10x more likely to be successful fully using our process than not doing so. We also bring our digital solution QED (Quartz Efficiency Driver) and the Quartz Management Spans and Layers Database.

In downturns, such as that provoked by the coronavirus today, companies may be forced to cut staff costs. And, according to the Quartz/ Harvard Business Review database of over 2,500 reorganizations, in 70% of cases, this adds value to the company. Yet, only 17% of such reorgs deliver their targets in the planned time and a higher number (19%) destroy value for the company. Our database shows us which actions separate successful reorgs from unsuccessful ones, and we can cut the data by industry, geography or function to reflect your situation.

It’s also important to remember that cost-cutting reorgs have a significant impact on the personal lives of your friends and colleagues, and on their families, and that it can demoralize your workforce, causing valued staff to take their decisions to leave (in 63% of cases). You owe it to your people to manage this with fairness, rigor, experience and a proven process. The biggest driver of failure is taking too long to implement, which delays the benefits and drags out the uncertainty and upset for all your staff, not just those who will ultimately be affected. The average reorg takes 12 months to fully implement. Quartz can help you deliver this in 6 months or less, meaning quicker results and less disruption.

Intelligently cut
organizational costs

Realign your organization to unlock growth

Your organization is perfectly designed to give you the results you have today. If you want to change your results, you need to change your organization.

Quartz Associates has spent the last three years helping companies – often in technology/ digital – to accelerate their growth: from <$10m private equity investments, to >$10bn global champions. At the beginning of every project we immerse ourselves in your business and strategy. And through surveys, our digital solution QED (Quartz Efficiency Driver), gamification, and expert interviews, we pinpoint what is really getting in the way of achieving your objectives.

At its most basic level, addressing these challenges involves getting your people to work differently. If accountabilities are unclear or incentives misaligned, this might involve structural change to get people focused on the right issues, in the right teams and with minimal interface issues. In many cases, moving away from rigidly functional organizations to self-contained business units and cross-functional project/ product teams can be the key to accelerating growth.

However, getting people to work differently is more than just changing whom they report to. We help you to set the right governance, design processes (such as product development, marketing, sales, people development etc.), define accountabilities and role profiles, identify the critical behaviors that need to change, realign management reporting to fit the new approach, and plan required systems changes. Most consulting firms can give you a nice PowerPoint explaining what you should do. We work with your leaders and staff to actually deliver the changes, more than twice as fast as the average reorganization (less than 6 months versus the typical 12 months).

Realign your organization
to unlock growth

Realign your organization to unlock growth

Our Quartz/ Harvard Business Review database tells us that only 8% of post-merger integrations fully deliver their objectives in the planned time, and 41% – way more than other types of reorgs – take longer than expected. In 10% of cases the reorg brought about by the merger actually harms the organization.

M&A-driven reorganizations share many of the characteristics of other types of reorgs: success (or failure) depends on the clarity of objectives, the comprehensiveness of the design (governance, structure, people, and processes), and the robustness of implementation planning. However, as two or more separate companies are involved, the challenges are multiplied. Compared to “regular reorgs”, with post-merger integrations: more of the organization is affected; they take longer (14 months on average compared to 12); they consume more of leadership’s time (40%-60% compared with 20%-40%); they lead to greater resistance from both leaders and employees; and they see business results suffer more during the changes.

The most important factor driving success is a detailed plan with specific change activities and milestones. Yet only 43% of post-merger integrations have a detailed plan. Nearly one third have no plan at all. The CEO of one of our major clients told us that typically there is only a high-level assessment of the acquired company’s organization and detailed consideration of the acquired company’s organization analysis often takes many months.

Quartz brings the tools to plan and deliver effective integrations. Our leaders bring extensive experience of organizational integration (especially from energy, tech and the financial sector). Quartz’s digital solution QED allows you to take data on the acquired company’s organizational structure, merge it with data on your own structure, model the future organization, and generate the specific actions required to deliver it (highlighting regulatory requirements for consultation etc.). We can do this whether or not the two companies are using the same or different ERP systems. Above all, we focus on what drives your people to work differently to deliver the value. That means not only changes to the organizational structure, but also to governance, roles, processes, systems and behaviors.

Integrate
acquisitions

How we do it

We help clients to deliver organizational design:

From start to finish

From translating business needs into organizational implications, through to launch of the changes

Based on Analytics and Technology

World’s largest database of organisational transitions, developed with HBR, and our proprietary technology the Quartz Efficiency Driver (QED)

Twice as fast as the average

In 6 months or less

With a focus on practical delivery

Making changes as we go rather than creating masses of documents

What is it like to work with Quartz?

Quartz works quite differently to traditional consulting firms:

Your team will be made up of experienced and expert consultants with at least 10 years relevant experience from industry or leading management consultancy firms
The project leader will spend real time on the ground with you (at least 1-2 day per week)
We bring the input and options for you to make the choices, then we make it happen
At the same time, we don’t pull our punches when asked to say what we think
Our deliverables are not PowerPoint pages but changes to the way your people work
Decisions get made as we go, in interactive workshops and decision meetings, not all at the end
We bring technology to accelerate the process: in particular, our proprietary software QED, which diagnoses organizational issues and manages the workflow to get changes implemented

What we do for our clients

We support our clients to:

How we do it

We help clients to deliver organizational design:

From start to finish

Based on Analytics and Technology

Twice as fast as the average

With a focus on practical delivery

What is it like to work with Quartz?

Contact Info

Tel: +44(0)20 7971 1288

Email: info@quartzassociates.com

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