Pargrow (Partnership for Growth) is a joint venture between The ASHDOWN Group Ltd. and Valley Strategies Ltd.

Valley Strategies is the consultancy arm of the Mud Valley(tm)  business strategy and brand marketing community.

Mud Valley is dedicated to providing its members

with free processes, beta-test tools & techniques

to help test their business & brand marketing strategies

Valley Strategies applies the Mud Valley knowledge base, workshops, processes, tools and templates to the real world, working alongside major clients to:

1. develop their strategic plans
2. bullet-proof their plans
3. optimally resource their plans
4. develop their brand marketing strategies
5. inform and verify their brand marketing strategies via leading-edge techniques
6. apply e-communications and e-survey tools to their businesses (forums, complaint capture, market research)

THE PROVING GROUND

Proving is believing ....

THE PROVING GROUND is our process for bullet-proofing strategic plans by involving employees, other stakeholders and external experts in the development and proving process.

It is perhaps a harsh observation, yet true, that in many business situations one set of people pretend to develop a plan, and another set of people pretend to implement it.

The developers of the plan do not have sufficient belief in it to risk driving it wholeheartedly through the organisation.

The implementers of the plan may well not even know it exists. If they do, they may not know what it is about, or understand their role in it. If they do, they may only have studied it because they see it as a potential threat to what they are already doing.

And if the plan comes from a bunch of 25-year-olds from McKinsey, Accenture or E&Y, and cost the organisation $400,000, so much the worse. There will be an allergic reaction, typical of a body being invaded by an alien virus.

For a strategic plan to be implemented effectively, you need three critical components:

1. a compelling, incisive plan that is capable of being achieved
2. a plan developed by your employees themselves, with professional support
3. "proven belief" in the plan among those who have to implement it

And, once you have developed your draft plan, you must be willing to let both strategic experts and employees tear it apart again in order to build a robust final version that will not only work, but have the wholehearted support of your organisation and its stakeholders.

Essential building blocks to creating the right environment to develop and implement bold and effective strategies:

• The team must believe that your top management is fully committed to turning the approved plan into business results
• Members of the team must trust each other, and be willing to advocate and challenge strategic options
• The facilitators must not only be "people's people", but also know how to cajole and provoke rigorous analysis and creative thinking
• The team must have ready access throughout the process to a selection of strategy experts whose guidance they trust, and to those who will be tasked with implementing the plan

We have developed a process for reviewing your plan, and then rebuilding, so as to ensure that everyone commits to it.

1.  we use a panel of strategic experts that we call "The Firing Squad" to scrutinise your plan, and identify where it is most likely to fail. All these consultants have at least 20 years� experience in their chosen fields. This is a technique used internally by the Big Four management consultancies to scrutinise their final presentations before submitting them to their clients 
2. we use Six Sigma techniques, and other tools, designed specifically to pinpoint where a process is likely to under-perform. The leading tool we use is the FMEA Failure Modes & Effects Analysis which asks where the problems are likely to arise, what damage there will be if they do, and how effective are your contingency plans to mitigate the damage 
3. we use stakeholder surveys to present the plan to your stakeholders, to obtain an overall confidence assessment, and to identify where your stakeholders believe there are weaknesses. These are the issues that must be addressed to build the proven belief that will lead to your plan being implemented effectively and consistently