Your company is doing well, but there's always room to increase profits by boosting revenues, reexamining spend and becoming more effective.
Typical Situation
There are many initiatives in progress and everyone is busy. However, there is no easy way to know how many initiatives are underway, their expected financial value, or whether these initiatives line up with the company's strategic focus.
The company might have an application for idea generation, but it doesn't do a good job of detailed evaluation, implementation tracking, or company-wide aggregation, so it tends to be used only for front-end innovation.
While people might want to collaborate cross-silo and sometimes do, there's no tool in place to make that efficient or practical.
While senior management meets regularly, they don't have a way to truly understand the complexities of each other's challenges.
The CFO doesn't have enough solid information to incorporate initiatives into the forecast or budget, and initiatives are often "back-pocketed" against P&L shortfalls in other areas.
Benefits of The IR Approach
Facilitates collaboration and leverages organizational expertise by allowing employees to look across the organization and participate where they have relevant experience.
Manages ideas and initiatives from initial "insight" to implemented project.
Highly structured and efficient portfolio reviews with the senior team foster cross-silo cooperation and increase morale.
The whole organization uses common formats and valuation methodologies. This allows the senior team to quickly and knowledgeably review the portfolio of insights, opportunities and projects being developed or underway.
The CFO can analyze the initiative portfolio for budgeting and planning purposes whenever he/she needs to — without having to issue time-consuming, one-off requests to the field.
