Outcomes
Staff utilisation rose steadily from around 60% to 74% and was still climbing at the close of the engagement. Return on Sales doubled as a result, and cash flow improved by 90%. The business exceeded its profit target for the financial year. Senior management adopted the Target Operating Model template as the basis for their annual planning and performance management framework, and staff surveys reported a more positive trend and a “general atmosphere of success.”
The Managing Director said: “Roke had previously been subject to a number of change programmes that had been imposed on the organisation. The key to Curzon’s success was their ability to work with the Roke Leadership Team and involve many members of staff in the design and implementation. At the core was a joint understanding of the need to develop a much more proactive culture of performance at the individual and business level. We now focus on our customers, internal as well as external.”
Background
In a good week, utilisation reached 60%. At its worst it fell below 50%. For a business whose revenue and profitability depended entirely on deploying skilled people against billable work, those numbers represented a fundamental structural problem. Most projects were overdue and over budget, and insufficient responsibility was being taken for budgets, customer engagement, delivery, and team performance across the organisation.
Previous change programmes had been imposed on the organisation rather than developed with it, and a resistance to change had taken root as a result. Any new initiative would need to overcome that legacy before it could begin to address the operational issues beneath it.
Curzon Approach
Curzon began with a root-and-branch business review, identifying opportunities to reduce direct costs and increase the deployment of billable staff simultaneously. The additional capacity unlocked would serve a dual purpose: clearing a backlog of overdue work and creating the headroom to win and deliver additional sales revenue within the year.
A Target Operating Model was designed covering processes, organisation, locations, information systems, suppliers, and management, giving the business a coherent blueprint for how it needed to operate rather than a piecemeal set of fixes. Resourcing control was centralised to make the allocation of people to work a more open, structured, and accountable process. Role-specific utilisation targets were modelled and set, establishing for the first time a clear performance expectation at the individual level. Sales and operations planning principles, drawn from manufacturing discipline, were introduced to bring the same rigour to white-collar working that the best operational businesses apply on the shop floor.
Throughout, the engagement was conducted with the organisation rather than done to it. Extensive communication at every level ensured the trust, input, and ownership that previous programmes had failed to achieve. The distinction mattered: where imposed change had repeatedly stalled, a co-designed transformation delivered results that senior management then adopted as the permanent framework for running the business.
