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QUARTZ CASE STUDIES
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Organization Cases
Global Technology Company – Expanding Into New Markets
Quartz Associates was engaged by a global technology company with several billion dollars of revenues to design and deliver a new organizational model. This project was typical of many of our projects in technology: the company had developed a formula for success that had been wildly successful in its chosen market, but that market was becoming saturated and other competitors were entering.
The company was losing momentum and the share price had fallen significantly from its peak. The company now needed to enter adjacent markets where different approaches were required. Our diagnostic revealed a functional organization without any clear accountabilities for both the new markets and the core business, and with challenges moving beyond product improvement into new product development.
We helped the leadership team agree a new organizational model with business units with clear accountabilities. We also helped the company design role profiles for its top 100 leaders and implement the changes in the model. As a result of our help, and other changes the company made, it was able to rebuild momentum and within 12 months the share price rose again to the previous peak.
Global Technology Company – Expanding Into New Markets
Medical Technology Business – Prioritization and Growth
Quartz Associates was engaged by a $600m revenue North American business unit of a global company.
The company had one core online product, which was becoming dated. It planned to use its position to build new software products, but product development was proving slow. As a result, it was falling behind its P&L targets.
Quartz’s diagnostic revealed a highly complicated functional organization where accountability only came together at the CEO and staff found it hard working across organizational interfaces to get things done.
We ran a workshop with the leadership team, presenting them with options to fix the functional model or move to business units: they chose the latter. We then worked with the client to detail out the structures, roles, process and required capabilities to get the model to work. In particular, we focused on the product development process, bringing one of our associates who had been CEO of a large tech company to help in the workshops.
As a result of the changes, the Business Unit is now hitting its targets, has stopped a number of product development projects that were not going anywhere, and has focused its efforts on new, more prospective opportunities.
Medical Technology Business – Prioritization and Growth
European R&D Agency – Increasing Spend and Impact
Quartz Associates was engaged by a new, large public sector funding organization, with spending of several billion Euros per year. The organization was in fact a merger of several constituent organizations, all of which had a similar approach to funding, but which each came with their own heritage, strengths and weaknesses.
The new organization was being asked by government to manage an additional 40% of funding per year, which would cut across these individual organizations.
Our diagnosis was able to highlight the areas where the constituent organizations were performing well and where they had gaps. We also revealed that the resources being devoted to managing the “new spending” (which the government was prioritizing) were much less than those focused on the “old spending”, creating a significant risk.
Mindful of both the existing strengths of the constituent organizations, and the challenges of changing public sector institutions, we helped the leadership team to focus on three changes: increasing resources on the “new spending”; clarifying and standardizing roles within the constituent parts to make them easier to manage and to enable transfers across them; and designing a new common funding process and system across the organization. Like most of our projects, the majority of our effort was focused on getting these changes made.
One of the leaders of the organization committed after the project: “Unlike other consultants I have experienced, Quartz always focused on practical, meaningful issues rather than theory.”
European R&D Agency – Increasing Spend and Impact
Global technology Company – Savings From A Corporate Function
Quartz was called in when a multi-billion revenue global technology company struggled to identify sufficient savings in one of its corporate functions.
When Quartz joined the project, the project team had already identified several million dollars in savings and were finding it hard to add more with the previous, bottom-up process. They were worried that it might be impossible to make the targets and deadlines set by the CEO.
Quartz helped the client by benchmarking the function’s number of employees against peers and by identifying several, top-down initiatives to deliver savings. These included a new model for business partners; prioritization of spend on technology; challenging discretionary activities such as project management and improvement teams; and outsourcing two functions for large cost savings.
Quartz deployed a very small coordinating team to organize the client project into groups working on each of these areas, structure their thinking, and encourage them to focus on practical implementation. In doing also, we built practical commitment to the ideas as well as increasing the chance of implementation.
The result was total savings that were four times higher than when we first arrived and the commitment of the team to deliver them.
Global technology Company – Savings From A Corporate Function
Operations Cases
Major Utility Company – Cutting the Costs of Reactive Work
Quartz was brought in to reduce the costs of responding to network faults in a multi-region utility, without undermining regulatory compliance or customer satisfaction.
We worked with leaders across 30 operational sites to develop the approach and initiatives, and supported the first wave of improvements across four sites.
When we arrived, the field force covered both planned work and faults. We set up a specific faults team in each site, sized to cover a routine level of faults, with the ability to seek further capacity from other teams in the event of larger incidents. We pulled decisions about resourcing away from the faults team to the dispatchers – removing the conflict of interest of the people deciding on overtime being those that benefit from it. We gave the dispatchers a prioritization tool to make decisions on which faults to prioritize, based on customer impact. And we put in place effective performance metrics and meetings for front line leaders to performance manage faults work.
As a result of these changes, we were able to deliver a 49.5% percentage point reduction in cost across the four first wave sites within 5 months. At the same time, far from being undermined, customer and employee satisfaction actually improved. We then codified the approach into a “faults playbook” for the client to roll out in subsequent waves.
Major Utility Company – Cutting the Costs of Reactive Work
Energy Company – More Efficient Delivery of Planned Work
Quartz was called in to support an energy company that needed to deliver work much more efficiently, while responding to the increase in demand caused by the energy transition.
We worked with the operational leaders for a distributed field force covering multiple regions.
We helped the client to deliver: clear ownership for work schedules; standard times and scheduling rules; tracking of people utilization; job and site readiness checks; reminders to complete time sheets in a timely manner; checks that customer billing was accurate; and performance management meetings to continuously improve. Across all of this, we established a shared language for how to talk about the work (e.g., using the “boulders” and “rocks” analogy or bigger jobs, with “pebbles” for small jobs that could be scheduled around them).
As a result of these changes, we increased the number of jobs delivered per day in one area by two thirds in four months, and reduced the unit cost of the jobs by over 50%. In another area, we increased the number of jobs by 40% within two months. Based on this proven approach, we we codified the approach into a “planned work playbook” for the client to roll out in other areas.