Huge potential in responsibility

Monday 3/26/12 - Ilkka Töyrylä and Mikael Niskala

	Mikael Niskala and Ilkka Töyrylä

The global retailer Walmart in 2009 reduced its packaging and rationalised its delivery routes. As a result, the distances covered by trucks were cut by 100 million miles, related carbon emissions were reduced, and Walmart saved more than 150 million dollars.

The British retailer Marks & Spencer is also in the process of overhauling its supply chain. For example, in the future, their choice of suppliers will be based on not having to ship supplies from one hemisphere to another. This will considerably reduce the carbon emissions caused by the company’s operations, and this is expected to save the retailer some 200 million euros annually. (Source: Harvard Business Review 2011)

“There is huge business potential in responsibility when viewed as an investment and not as an expense. One can only wonder why so few companies have managed to transform the challenges related to sustainable development into a genuine competitive advantage,” say Midagon’s Ilkka Töyrylä and Tofuture’s Mikael Niskala.

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Change Culture as a success factor

Wednesday 2/29/12 - Tarja Leikas ja Ari-Pekka Pekari

	Ari-Pekka Pekari and Tarja Leikas

A positive change culture is more central than ever to the success of businesses: the world changes and businesses must change accordingly. What does a change culture mean? What is it built on? What are its threats?

Tarja Leikas, CFO at TeliaSonera Finland, and Midagon’s Ari-Pekka Pekari list the key elements of a positive change culture. At the same time, the duo discusses the roles that financial management, the management team and the coach play in successfully following through major change projects.

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The Project is Complete, But Nothing Has Changed? Three Steps to a Successful Change

Thursday 10/27/11 - Ari-Pekka Pekari

	Ari-Pekka Pekari Managing Consultant

Although business changes have become commonplace in companies, most of the strategic change projects are unsuccessful.

– The approach to managing change is not always comprehensive enough, a leading consultant, Ari-Pekka Pekari observes.

– The company might focus too much on sketching organisational boxes while forgetting other perspectives, such as the search for new practices.  Correspondingly, processes might be tightened without fixing the ineffective or haphazard decision-making guiding the processes.

In his article, Mr Pekari presents a comprehensive, three-stage approach, which helps a business of any size or in any industry to drive through a strategic change project with success.

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Six questions to help you work out whether your change initiative will succeed

Tuesday 9/6/11 - Karoliina Vanhanen

	Karoliina Vanhanen Managing Consultant

Two thirds of all change programmes undertaken in companies will fail. Schedules stretch, the budget is exceeded and only some of the objectives are met. The question arises: What can we do to make sure that our project is in the successful one third?

The leading consultant Karoliina Vanhanen prepared a list of six questions to help anyone about to embark on a change programme. Companies can use this list to ensure that their project has a solid starting point and a realistic chance of success.

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From minor mistakes to toxic information

Wednesday 8/24/11 time 10:28 AM - Petri Malmelin and Vesa Lujala

	Petri Malmelin and Vesa Lujala

What do DDT and incorrect data have in common?

They are both toxins that become concentrated, i.e. accumulate,  the former in the food chain, the latter in the corporate information pyramid. The higher up one travels in the chain or pyramid, the higher the toxin concentrations rise, and the more fatal they become.

Petri Malmelin and Vesa Lujala challenge enterprises to think about the correctness and reliability of the information available to management. They examine the origins and reasons for incorrect information and ways of minimizing it.

“These issues call for IT solutions, yet everything must start out with people, education and fact-based measuring. This will deliver measurable benefits long before the first phases of costly IT projects are ready for rollout,” the duo say.

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Look in a crystal ball, not the rear view mirror

Friday 5/6/11 - Miika Sipilä

	Miika Sipilä Managing Consultant

If a company does not pick up the crystal ball and forecast the future, its customers will slip away to competitors, says Miika Sipilä, Managing Consultant at Midagon. “Analyses of historical data contribute little to an understanding of customers’ individual requirements. As in the stock market, historical performance is no indicator of the future.”

According to Sipilä, a case in point demonstrating the importance of forecasting comes from Nokia, which in the basic phones sector failed to comprehend the inner workings of the Asian market and therefore lost valuable market share to its rivals.

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Brand image in focus - actions speak louder than words

Thursday 3/17/11 - Tuomas Virtamo

	Tuomas Virtamo

BP (the former British Petroleum) has spent big bucks on injecting environmental friendliness into its brand image. The oil giant’s efforts have turned into more of a greenwash, however: there has been a vast gap between the values that BP advocates and the reports on what it actually does.

World-famous guitar makers Fender and Gibson, as well as clothing designer Tommy Hilfiger also forgot to practice what they preached – the former in the 1970s, the latter at the turn of the millennium. All three suffered greatly for their mistake, and had ultimately had no other choice but to adapt their activities to reflect their original values.

”Brand image is about more than words, it is the sum total of everything a company does,” Midagon’s sales powerhouse Tuomas Virtamo emphasizes.

“The company’s mission, strategy and values must be embraced throughout the organization and they should form a clear framework for all external communications. It is up to company management to ensure that this holds true.”

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Pöysti & Malmelin: The 9-stop technique

Monday 2/28/11 time 5:08 PM

A failed change project is the worst and costliest mistake a business can make. Feelings and intuition trump logic. The worst kind of deception is self-deception. Not everything has to be fun.

Actor-turned-business speaker Tom Pöysti and Midagon CEO Petri Malmelin got together to give their ideas on teamwork and change management a good airing. The duo lambasted conformity, the overrating of logic and the “but we are having such a good time” approach to teamwork– and waxed lyrical in praise of the power of honesty, conflict, adventure and meaning.

The discussion gave rise to a nine-point list on the elements required for productive teamwork and successful change undertakings. Everything on this list is common knowledge, easy to understand and widely accepted. Why is it, then, that living by it seems so hard?

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USA-Brazil-Mexico: consulting in three cultures

Thursday 12/30/10 time 10:12 AM - Niina Maijala

	Niina Maijala Managing Consultant

Niina Maijala is an expert at changing both her outfit and her way of working and communicating on the fly. Foreign postings in the Americas have taught her that what works up North can have the exact opposite effect down South.

“What is more important than having the project put together properly is taking on board the local ways of working. One can of course draw on the European approach, but it is vital to adapt to the local management style while still holding on to one’s personality,” she says.

Maijala has spent eight years working as project manager and program manager in global business-critical change projects in the New World – the first four years in the US, another four in Mexico and Brazil. 

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The time for mobile services is now

Wednesday 11/17/10 time 3:12 PM - Allan Halme

	Allan Halme Managing Consultant

One of the biggest insider tech bubbles of ten years ago was the up-and-coming mass rollout of mobile services. But by modern standards, the cell phones of the day were unremarkable, and data transmission was both slow and expensive. And despite all the industry hype, normal people did not really know what to expect of mobile services – if anything.

Fast-forward to the present. Cell phones have transformed into mobile devices, the technology required to provide services is in place, and mobile broadband is both fast and inexpensive. More importantly, increasing numbers of people want their information, services and friends to come along with them wherever they go.

Managing Consultant Allan Halme calls on organizations to take a long hard look at the potential now offered by mobile services. 
“The time to strike is now. Any further procrastination is just a cop-out,” he claims.

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Outsourcing: a hot-button issue

Monday 10/18/10 time 9:41 AM - Ilkka Töyrylä

Ilkka Töyrylä Managing Consultant

Outsourcing is one of those coffee table discussions that raises a lot of emotions. Managing Consultant Ilkka Töyrylä is baffled by the level of the debate.

"A surprising amount of the conversation is just a 'yes-it-is-no-it-isn't' discussion based on impressions and prejudices, even though, for the company or organization doing the outsourcing, it is mainly all about a cost-benefit analysis", he says.

In his article, Töyrylä describes when the outsourcing service provider can deliver the service more inexpensively and with higher quality than the client, and still make a profit, and when they can't. And he lists the main reasons for outsourcing -- including those that are not typically said out loud.

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Belly flop or big hit? The keys to successful change

Thursday 9/16/10 time 11:27 PM - Johanna Hentunen

	Johanna Hentunen Managing Consultant

Fancy strategies can be put forward by anyone, but people who have the skills and the staying power to push change through in an organization are few and far between, says Johanna Hentunen. According to her, the fundamental elements of any successful change project are crystal-clear focus and management commitment, ability to execute, seamless cooperation between a seasoned duo of sponsor and project manager, and effective communications with key stakeholders.

“Implementing any change project is 90 percent communication, and a project plan is essentially a communications plan. Even if a project has been communicated to a wider extent than ever before, there probably should and could have been more communication, and better on point,” she says.

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High Performance Team at the core of successful change

Thursday 6/3/10 time 7:55 PM - Petri Malmelin

	Petri Malmelin Managing Consultant

If a team consists of ten people and each of them gives 80 percent to a project, the total comes to 0,8¹⁰ or roughly 0.1. If each team member is able to exceed expectations and give 110 percent, this translates into 1,1¹⁰ or roughly 2.6. Although the above approach in fact does not hold water, it does provide some insight into the essence of the High Performance Team or HPT.

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So you have a supply chain strategy

Thursday 3/25/10 time 2:56 PM - Isto Haverinen

	Isto Haverinen Managing Consultant

Businesses expend enormous amounts of time, money and other resources on preparing strategies for their various functions. Supply chain management is no exception. Much deliberation and documentation goes into topics such as main markets, production facility locations and related priorities, warehouse locations and inventory levels as well as product delivery systems.

The end result of these efforts is a finalized strategy document, which can be used in a number of ways. The worst-case scenario has the strategy document posted on the company’s intranet, forwarded to key employees and then forgotten. A project whose costs perhaps ran into millions of euro may in practice have been nothing but a costly exercise in documentation.

Isto Haverinen points out that strategy preparation is only step one. All the time and money spent on the strategy is wasted if the strategy is not rolled out throughout the organization. In this article, Haverinen lists the critical success factors and challenges in strategy cascading. He illustrates the topic with a customer case study where inventories were successfully cut to one tenth of the original.

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From data dust to distilled information

Thursday 2/25/10 time 5:43 PM - Tommi Noro

	Tommi Noro Managing Consultant

Corporate management looks to the future and makes decisions based on the information available. If that information is insufficient, irrelevant or erroneous, the decisions based on it will take the company in the wrong direction. The larger the enterprise, the costlier the mistakes can be.

Business Intelligence, the doctrine focusing on the refinement and efficient utilization of information, is one of the ‘hot spots’ where enterprises are looking for competitive advantage as the recession recedes. In this article, Tommi Noro reviews the elements and benefits of BI, examines change and its measurement, lists the preconditions for a successful BI project and describes the utilization of BI in enhancing customer satisfaction.

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The seven pitfalls of product development

Friday 2/5/10 time 2:27 PM - Virpi Kanala

	Virpi Kanala Managing Consultant

Companies have a wealth of models and guidelines available for product development projects and their implementation. International companies in particular recognise and make use of these process models. Precisely how well companies can adapt the models for their projects varies case by case.

Drawing on her 15 years of experience in leading projects, Virpi Kanala discusses the key factors of success and failure in product development projects.

What is the right team make-up, and how do you build up a team from a group of individual experts? What is the relative significance of the chemistry between people? What are the risks involved in an over-optimistic project plan? And how do you prepare for the inevitable changes?

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The three steps of evaluating the feasibility of your outsourcing project

Saturday 12/19/09 time 1:50 PM - Ilkka Töyrylä (Midagon Oy) ja Henrik Lares (Adcose Ltd)

	Ilkka Töyrylä and Henrik Lares

The outsourcing of IT application support has been a hot topic in enterprises for several years. Now we are in a situation where a lot of practical outsourcing experience has been accumulated. The issue is particularly topical in the current tightened market situation with hard pressure towards cost savings.

Suppliers of outsourcing services compete intensely for new contracts. They are actively approaching enterprises and promising substantial benefits to be gained through outsourcing IT application support. It is not uncommon for their estimates of potential cost savings to be as high as 40 percent.

Ilkka Töyrylä of Midagon and Henrik Lares of Adcose view the issue from another angle. They provide concrete advice on how to proceed with an outsourcing project. The duo’s message can be crystallized in three statements: understand your starting point, understand the alternatives in the outsourcing market and calculate your potential.

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Change or perish

Saturday 11/28/09 - Petri Malmelin

	Petri Malmelin Managing Consultant

“There is nothing permanent except change.” Truer words are seldom spoken, not least in the world of business. Companies that are not prepared to make timely and smart changes will suffer and eventually perish, while innovative enterprises unafraid of change can manage through the tough times – and when the economic turnaround comes, as it always does, have a considerable edge over rivals that focused on belt-tightening measures instead.

A word of qualification, though: this is only the case when change is successfully executed. Studies show that only one third of major change projects are successful, and a mere seven percent qualify as true success stories. Two thirds of all change projects are either irrelevant or utter failures: in other words a waste of money, resources and effort.

Petri Malmelin discusses challenges and best practices in change projects, and introduces a cube model that helps see the big picture.

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The colour of efficiency is green

Tuesday 11/3/09 time 10:49 AM - Isto Haverinen

Isto Haverinen Managing Consultant

The economically challenging business environment is hampering businesses in their implementation of green projects. In principle, ‘going green’ is perceived as something valuable and worth pursuing, yet in practice both enthusiasm and audacity are curbed by the common misconception of environmental friendliness being costly and even inefficient.

The aspect lost in this debate is the fact that greater efficiency in supply chain management in particular often also reduces the enterprise’s carbon footprint – making the business automatically ‘greener’.

Isto Haverinen is not claiming that greenness would be the answer to everything, but he will demonstrate that environmental efficiency often goes hand in hand with economic efficiency.

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Agility in the cloud

Friday 10/30/09 time 11:49 AM - Vesa Lujala

Vesa Lujala Senior Architect

The fundamental idea of cloud computing is that computing tasks are transferred from the computers and servers of individual users and businesses to systems on the Internet.

Vesa Lujala outlines the term through three different levels. He contemplates the risks and strengths of cloud computing and its relationship to agile application development.

“The combination of cloud computing and agile application development makes it possible to implement new business support applications in a few days or weeks compared to months or even years required for conventional projects,” Lujala says.

“The benefits of cloud computing are emphasised particularly in fairly short projects where resources can be allocated to the creation of new functionality instead of ‘tuning’ the environments.”

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