How an engagement runs, from kick-off to the finish line.

Creation

This phase runs like a focused project:

• A core project team of 8–12 people — the sweet spot for efficient, interdisciplinary collaboration, regardless of how large the underlying issue is.
• Executive sponsorship, non-negotiably. For smaller organizations, the owner or CEO. For larger ones, a country head, division CEO, or regional CEO. Change doesn’t sustain itself if it isn’t visibly backed from the top.
• Broader organizational input, typically gathered through targeted surveys — in past engagements we’ve captured input from hundreds of employees to make sure the core team’s thinking reflects the organization’s actual reality.

A team-efficiency tool runs throughout the entire process. We never work without one, and for 20 years it’s been the same tool: HBDI, which we’ve used with more than 3,500 professionals across 500+ teams. It gives every project team a shared, more precise language from day one.

Delivery — the Project Management Office

We define strategy as a magnetic field pulling toward a common point — the force that aligns every decision made across the organization, every day, toward the same outcome. The average professional makes roughly 20 decisions a day; a 30-person team makes around 600. Left to individual judgment, those 600 decisions scatter. A clearly defined, well-communicated strategy is what pulls them into alignment.

• A recurring one-hour weekly review of all active actions
• Standard project-management discipline, familiar to virtually every organization
• An external facilitator on the call each week, asking the questions that keep accountability alive

It’s precisely the “sticky” issues — the ones that matter but never quite become anyone’s full-time priority — that get resolved once there’s a person in the room every week whose job is to ask about them. Several clients have made this a standing part of how they operate, in relationships that have now run for over ten years.

This is also why we can offer cancel-any-time: once the strategy document is set, typically around the three-month mark, this second half of our value delivery begins. Clients who’ve experienced it rarely walk away, because it’s precisely where most strategy initiatives elsewhere quietly die.

How long it takes

Most engagements run 12 to 18 months, depending on scope. Twelve months is the minimum we’ve found for a genuinely sustainable implementation. The more the initiative requires people to change their actual ways of working — daily habits, not just priorities — the closer it moves toward 18 months. As a rule of thumb, 18 months is the realistic minimum for any major organizational step-change.

It’s deliberately mission-based and time-bound: a clearly defined goal, a clearly defined outcome, and a clear end date. Traditional strategy programs tend to be broad and need maintaining across several leadership generations; Strategy as a Service is scoped so that a single management generation can see it through, start to finish.

What’s included

• A complete strategy deck, built collaboratively with your core team
• Weekly PMO facilitation through to the finish line
• A visibly more efficient, more aligned team by the end of the engagement
• An organizational learning process with benefits that extend well beyond the original issue