Prominence provides strategy development and strategic workshop facilitation for a wide range of clients, including across the health and community services sector.
These services range from the design and delivery of one or multi-day strategic planning workshops, through to more comprehensive processes including environmental scanning and internal and external stakeholder engagement processes in the lead up to and during the strategic planning process, and post strategy processes, including supporting operational planning cascading from the strategic plan.
We have facilitated strategy development processes for Queensland Department of Health business units, hospital and health services, innovative public sector health/ university partnerships, and non-government community health and community services organisations, working with Board’s, senior executive teams, and steering committees. Our services have included strategic plan refreshes, entirely new look and feel plans, and the development of the very first strategic plan for a public sector/ university partnership.
These engagements have all required our consultants to rapidly review key background documents and engage with key stakeholders to understand the current strategic organisational environment, collective and divergent perspective, and distil or revisit critical issues for future success, to enable the design of a process that ensures strong engagement, robust discussion and debate, and a clear and focused way forward. This at times has required complex, sensitive engagement with internal and external stakeholders.
Our engagement with stakeholders includes exploring individual and collective views on:
- the most significant strategic influences and implications for the next horizon
- current organisation capability strength (for leveraging) and areas for improvement
- aspiration for next horizon performance and the strategic options open to our client
- satisfaction with current governance, performance and culture
- emerging areas of strategic risk and opportunity.
While subject to the specific needs of our client, we typically facilitate post planning workshop/s debriefs, and support further refinement and finalisation of the strategic plan document.
Key strengths consistently demonstrated in delivering of strategic planning projects include:
- a structured and collaborative approach to ensure full alignment between us, our client and their stakeholders throughout the engagement
- rapid knowledge acquisition of our client’s business
- an effective pre-workshop process to assess collective and any divergent thinking – this allows development of a process and sufficient time for rigorous debate at the workshop/s (rather than starting with a blank page)
- a highly engaging approach to interviews and workshops which ensure that views and ideas are openly shared. It also means that those involved are taken on a journey and are more likely buy in and own the end deliverable and align with the organisation in meeting its future objectives
- highly engaging and energising workshops, including the effective use of new tools and techniques often unfamiliar to but also refreshingly different for the client
- a strategic thinking and questioning style
- ability to facilitate a room with different types of personalities and involve and engage them in the process
- an ability to challenge, unpack and test stakeholder views and differences – helping with gaining alignment on the future direction and on key initiatives and strategies required to deliver on the organisations’ objectives.
We also use each engagement as an opportunity to upskill those involved in the process in terms of their ability to think and plan strategically and their ability to influence and drive positive change.
Participants consistently report that their individual ideas/ concerns had been heard as part of a reaching a collective view, which enabled effective debate and decision-making at workshops and in the post-workshop follow up processes.
The end deliverable in all our engagements is quality documents that are objective, clear and concise, approved by the client, which clearly articulates the organisations vision, purpose, values, objectives, strategic initiatives, measures of performance along with key risks and opportunities. We produce documents in our clients branded templates or if preferred, in a format best suited to enabling their internal or external designers to produce the final product.
