After their acquisition by France Telecom, Orange designed a business transformation programme of 16 key elements and asked CITI to help deliver the mobile multi-media services programme.

Opportunity

Identifying and focusing on the benefits and gaining an understanding of the cultural and organisational consequences of the programme were critical to success. The programme was planned to integrate internet/mobile phone and digital TV chat under a new Orange World brand before the new businesses were floated on the Stock Exchange.

Approach

Called in to help facilitate the programme at a very early stage, CITI programme manager Simon Peach said, “As we have worked with Orange before, the managers valued the insights that we were able to bring, while building a programme to suit their needs. Outsourcing control of the programme was simple, easy and quicker for the company.”

Ensuring the entrepreneurial culture of Orange successfully merged with the culture of France Telecom, and with the diverse cultures of the stakeholders and operations in smaller markets throughout the world, was a major aim of the exercise. A further challenge was trying to make meaningful progress when so few people were aware of the programme.

In its simplest form, CITI’s strategic implementation planning approach identifies and ‘proves’ the relationship between the blueprint of the new organisation (its target operating model), the customer value proposition and benefits case for the transformation. The core element is the ‘As-is’ and ‘To-be’ modelling process. The ‘As-is’ identified Orange’s current operation, while the ‘To-be’ focused on the future – the blueprint.

The value of this sophisticated approach to structuring the programme was that, when the planning stage was complete, it was clear that unless a radically different organisational design was adopted the programme would fail. “The CITI approach to programme planning ensures an holistic approach is taken and this focused the attention of the team we were working with on the organisational design issues that had to be addressed to ensure a successful resolution,” said Simon.

Realising they had to sort out the organisation design issues, Orange concentrated on addressing these whilst delivering a limited number of ‘quick-wins’ – benefits driven projects that had been identified during the programme planning effort.

Outcome

The programme was a great success – once again the benefits driven approach, which is the basic principle behind CITI’s strategic implementation planning, cut through the complexity and yielded the results sought.

Further reading

We also discuss business transformation programmes here:
http://consulting.citi.co.uk/tesco-business-transformation-programme/