We are a network of experienced professionals with diverse backgrounds. We have all worked with start-ups, small businesses, and large enterprises. We have worked with organisations in all kinds of sectors, including healthcare, manufacturing, media, travel, IT, professional services, finance, entertainment, and the public sector. Our subject-matter expertise spans data science, human capital, IT, finance, risk, marketing, business continuity, and project management. Rather than concentrating on any particular setting, we aim to supplement our clients' deep specialist expertise with insights and solutions they may not otherwise have considered.

Although we often have different views on how to get there, we share a few common beliefs on the keys to business and project success.

• Know your strategy. This seems obvious, but many organisations - even ones which seem to be succeeding - don't. A true strategy is a history of success written in the future tense. If it's not coherent enough to explain your success, it's not a strategy. If it can't be checked against the present to see whether it's working, it's not a strategy. If it's not detailed enough to tell you what you're doing (or what you should be doing), it's not a strategy.

• If it's not core, don't do it. This is a hard discipline to master. Once you know your strategy, anything that doesn't help you achieve it is delaying or preventing you from achieving it. Even if it's a great idea. Whether it's a new hire, a R&D initiative, an IT project, or a marketing campaign, it needs to map back to your strategy.

• Initiatives fail in the planning, not the execution. At first glance, this can seem counter-intuitive: in retrospect, it often seems like execution has let us down. However, the bulk of execution risk arises from insufficient resources devoted to the planning stage. Time pressures (both internal and external) often lead us to impose artificial deadlines. A 6 month project that "needs to go live" in 6 weeks is often a failed project that is DOA in 8 months. Sometimes management time is abundant at the project autopsy stage, but scarce when it would be most useful at project inception. Whatever the cause, with adequate planning, execution should be a mechanical process. Without it, successful execution is a miracle.

• Be data informed, not data led. Especially as our data horizons expand, and as being seen to be "data-driven" becomes essential, it can be tempting to put excessive faith in analytics and models. It's easy to forget the error bars, however, and draw conclusions (and make decisions) not supported by the data we have. Moreover, in a dynamic environment, we sometimes need to make decisions well before we have the data we'd like or else miss out on opportunities. Decades of working with quantitative data has convinced us that for the most important choices, even the best-analysed data can only be our guide.

• Strategic advisory. It's your business, and it needs to be your strategy. But we can:

  • test and challenge your ideas from new perspectives;

  • offer new possibilities;

  • elicit input from outside your ELT; and,

  • synthesise the whole into a clear, executable path forward.

• Project advisory. We can help identify projects which align with your strategy, provide immediate tangible results, and build capacity for further execution. We can also provide counsel on how to identify project vulnerabilities, minimise execution risk, and generate robust estimates for planning.

• Data and analytics advisory. We can help identify organisational knowledge gaps blocking success, and the data needed to fill them. We can also advise on how best to capture, manage, and analyse these data to turn them into information-data with a purpose.

• Innovation advisory. Harnessing the insights and creativity of your broader employee base can be the key to sustainable success (as well as employee engagement and productivity). However, both traditional organisational structures and new ways of working can make it difficult to capture this as organisational IP. We can help unlock some of this potential

• Human capital advisory. For most organisations, human capital management ought to be the single most important function in the organisation. Often, however, it's an afterthought. Whom you hire, whom you retain, and how you help them grow ultimately determine the limits of your organisational performance. We can help you move your HCM function from an afterthought to the core of your strategy.

• Turnaround advisory. Sometimes the clearest path to success takes a business through significant challenges. Provided your business is solvent, we can help with the difficult but necessary transition to success.

• Competitive pricing. Although we can accommodate fixed price engagements or time-and-materials billing, our preferred model involves a small retainer and upside based on measured success.

• Resourcing. If you already have a clear strategy and initiatives planned out to execute it, that's great. We are too small to offer full-time resourcing options for extended periods. Depending on the nature of the work you need to get done, we may be able to help in the selection of suitable contractors or resourcing firms to get your project over the line, but that's not our focus.

• Insolvency/Special Situations. We are not administrators, liquidators or accountants.

• Project management. A good project manager needs to guide the project from inception through to bedding-down and be constantly available throughout that period. We work with project managers to help them succeed, but we don't have the capacity to manage large projects ourselves.

• Orphan initiatives. We don't work on initiatives which don't have the support (including time commitment) of executive management, no matter how interesting. You shouldn't either.

• Speculative work. We don't work on unfunded PoCs. We can assist in building a business case, doing risk analysis, or assessing the potential value of a (successful) project to your business to help you marshal resources, but we are too small (and wise) to eat the time-loss of this kind of work.

• Web design. (But you probably guessed that).

please e-mail us to arrange a confidential discussion about your business' needs, and whether Papingo can help you meet them.